Question

Describe Classical Conditioning including Neutral Stimulus, Unconditioned Response, Unconditioned Stimulus, Conditioned Response, Conditioned Stimulus, Acquisition, Higher-Order Conditioning., Extinction, Spontaneous Recovery and Generalization.

Answer 1

Learning is the relatively permanent change in behavior which occur due to experience but not due to developmental process. classical conditioning a type of respondent learning devised by Ivan Pavlov. Respondent conditioning means a learning which happens as a means of responding to a stimulus. Classical conditioning occurs when a object ( a neutral stimulus) learn to evoke a response ( conditioned response) by continuous pairing with another object ( unconditioned stimulus), which actually produces the unconditioned response.

Neutral stimulus is the stimulus which does not evoke the unconditioned response before pairing. After pairing with an unconditioned stimulus a neutral stimulus will become a conditioned stimulus. As the name indicate it is neutral or does not make any response. For example the sound of bell in Pavlov's experiment is a neutral stimulus, which does not produces the conditioned response before pairing.

Unconditioned response (U C R ) is the response produced by an object with out any further pairing. For example salivation of dog to food. There is no need of learning to be take place for the dog to salivate for food, hence called unconditioned response to the stimulus food. Unconditioned stimulus (U C S) is the stimulus with out conditioning able to evoke the unconditioned response, here in the example food (meat powder) is an U C S which without conditioning produces the response of salivation in dog.

Conditioned Stimulus ( C S ) is the stimulus after pairing which attained the ability, or has learned to evoke the conditioned response. In Pavlov experiment the bell after pairing has learned to make the response of salivation in dog. Here the bell is a conditioned stimulus which earlier was not producing the response of salivation in dog, but after pairing has acquired it. The response to this conditioned stimulus is called Conditioned Response ( C R ). The dog salivating to bell is an example off conditioned response, the dog learned to salivate to bell after conditioning.

Acquisition is the ability of the conditioned stimulus to attain or learn the new behavior of producing the conditioned response. This is the first stage of learning in which the response is first presented.Where the behavior is said too be acquired.

Extinction is the process where when no longer pairing of stimulus response is carried out, the conditioned stimulus would loose the ability to produce the conditioned response. The behavior is said to be extincted. Fading of the response if the pairing is not continued for a period of time.

Spontaneous Recovery is reappearance of the conditioned response after the extinction. The behavior reappears after the extinction period where the response was not happening. Stimulus Generalization and Stimulus discrimination are tendency of stimulus similar to evoke the same response, and tendency to discriminate between similar objects. For example if a dog started to salivate by hearing a particular tune ad conditioning the dog to salivate to similar sounds is stimulus generalization. And making the dog learn to discriminate between different tones of bell and responding only to particular bell is stimulus discrimination.

Higher order conditioning is conditioning happens after initial learning has taken place. It is also called second order conditioning, where a neutral stimulus is paired with a conditioned stimulus rather than an unconditioned stimulus. For example after the dog acquired the behavior to salivate to bell, then using bell, the conditioned stimulus to make the dog salivate to a blue colored light. Here blue colored light being the neutral stimulus and bell is the conditioned stimulus, not an unconditioned stimulus.