classical conditioning

• stimulus is a situation or action that envokes a response
• response is a behaviour or action that is triggered by a stimulus
• what is the difference between a neutral and conditioned stimulus?

  a neutral stimulus does not evoke any particular response whereas a condition stimulus evokes a learned response (which was previously a neutral one)
• an unconditioned stimulus is an event or situation that naturally evokes a reaction (doesn't don't need to be learned)
• an unconditioned response is a reaction that occurs naturally after a stimulus
• real life experiment : pavlovs dog and the little albert experiment
• classical conditioning is a passive learning style
• what happened during Pavlovs experiment?


  Pavlov introduced one neutral stimuli and an unconditioned stimuli simultaneously to his dog, a bell and a plate of food. Whenever Pavlov showed the dog food a bell would follow. Soon the dog began to associate the sound of the bell with food and would salivate.
• what is temporal continuity?


  it is that if the spaces between the stimuli the learning can't happen
• what is spontaneous recovery?


  it is when a conditioned response can reappear after a stimulus is presented after a rest period. this shows that whilst these learned associations can be fade, they are not forgotten
• if one stimulus is repeatedly presented without the other, the conditioned response will eventually be forgotten and is now 'extinguished'
• after a subject has been conditioned, they will also react to similar stimuli in a similar manner. the closer in likeliness the stimuli to closer the response to the original. this is generalisation
• classical conditioning is used today in education, therapy and marketing