Second Order Conditioning

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Extinction means that a response elicited by an UCS will not continually work up to infinity. For extinction to occur it is not even necessary for the UCS to stop occurring, only that it stops occurring at the right time relationship (Hill, 1981, p.65). Extinction can be produced by extending the time interval between the CS and the UCS that would allow conditioning. Conditioning is more durable than extinction this is suggested by the phenomenon of spontaneous recovery(paraphrase). The occurrence of spontaneous recovery means that extinction is forgotten more rapidly than the original conditioning (Hill, 1981, p.65) and the subject is once more able to elicit a response. If one were to continue to extinguish the response, without periodically …show more content…

Pavlov realised that he could further extend this process and go for third order conditioning but he figured it would be difficult to obtain the desired outcome. In one experiment a dog was conditioned to salivate to a bell and once this was established he paired the bell alone with a black box (neutral stimulus) and after a number of trials, the black square alone produced salivation (Crain, 1992, …show more content…

Here the teacher wanted to introduce a red flag as a neutral stimulus. After she was sure that she had solidly conditioned the learners to the CS she the does the process of conditioning by making the clapping of hands as a UCS and raising the flag as a CS. She first raises the flag and the learners do not respond she then claps her hands and the children responds after a number of attempts the learners now elicit a response to the red flag alone that would then be referred to as second order conditioning. In conclusion I am going to make a few observations regarding the theory of classical conditioning. In order for conditioning to occur the UCS must follow the CS. It has been found that any stimulus can be used for conditioning but in order for the stimulus to be effective it has to be more noticeable to the subject that it will be conditioned upon ( i.e. physical stimuli, sound stimuli etc.). Furthermore the two stimuli being the CS and UCS have to be presented in close succession meaning that the UCS must be presented immediately after the CS is presented so that the process is