CLASSICAL CONDITIONING
Definition of Learning
Life is a process of continual change. From infancy to adolescence to adulthood to death, we are changing. Many factors work together to produce those changes, but one of the most important is the process of learning. Through our experiences, we learn new information, new attitudes, new fears, and new skills; we also learn to understand new concepts, to solve problems in new ways, and even to develop a personality over a lifetime. And in the course of reading textbooks, we learn new definitions for words like learning: In psychology the term learning refers to any relatively permanent change in behaviour brought about through experience—that is, through interactions
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If you have frequently visited the seashore with a friend, visiting the seashore alone will probably trigger memories of that friend. If you got sick the last time you ate a hot dog, you will likely feel nauseous the next time you see one. Learning through association is a common part of our lives.
Before we can proceed much further in our understanding of classical conditioning, we need to learn some new terminology. Although a bit awkward and confusing at first, these new terms will allow us to expand our discussion of classical conditioning to topics more relevant to your own experiences than salivating dogs without losing sight of the basic concept. First we use each of these four new terms to refer to the specific stimuli and responses in Pavlov’s experiments, then we use them with new examples. The new terms are as follows.
1. Unconditioned Stimulus – The meat which was given to the dogs in Pavlov’s experiments was the unconditioned stimulus (UCS). This can be any stimulus that can elicit the response without any learning. In other words, the response to an unconditioned stimulus is natural and