GEOLOGY 002 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Classical Conditioning, The Control Group, Hebbian Theory
Document Summary
Classical conditioning is a learning process that creates new reflexes. A reflex is a simple, relatively automatic, stimulus response sequence mediated by the nervous system a particular well-defined event in the environment, a stimulus, results in a particular well- defined behavior, a response. In the course of these studies, pavlov encountered a problem. Dogs that had been given food on previous occasions in his experiments would salivate before they received any food: to study such reflexes, pavlov deliberately controlled the signals that preceded food. In one experiment he sounded a bell just before placing food in the dog"s mouth. After several such pairings of a bell with food, the dog would salivate in response to the bell sound alone; no food was necessary. Pavlov referred to the stimulus (the bell sound, in this case) as a conditioned stimulus, and he referred to the response to that stimulus (salivation) as a conditioned response.
