74 PSYCHOLOGY
that infant to learn and develop normal intelligence. If the infant had no sense of
touch or smell or balance, then learning would be next to impossible.Learning is a more or less permanent change in behavior, or a behavioral tendency, as a
result of.Answer: experience.Classical Conditioning: Responding to Signals
Imagine that you are reading a menu in a restaurant and your mouth begins to
water. Is this an example of classical conditioning? Yes, it is. You were not born
with a tendency to salivate when looking at a menu. This is behavior acquired
through experience, and, consequently, a kind of learning. Salivating to words on
paper is a conditioned reflex.
Classical conditioning was the first kind of learning to be studied experimen-
tally. The pioneer researcher into classical conditioning was Ivan Pavlov
(1849–1936), a Russian physiologist. Classical conditioningis characterized by
the capacity of a previously neutral stimulus to elicit a reflex. If a dog is trained to
salivate each time that it hears a tone of a specific frequency, then the tone is the
previously neutral stimulus and the act of salivating is the reflex. Pavlov achieved
his results primarily with a number of dogs that were trained to patiently cooper-
ate with the researcher while being restrained in harnesses in the laboratory.
There are four basic terms, all closely related, that you need to learn as the
foundation stones of your understanding of classical conditioning. These are (1)
the unconditioned stimulus, (2) the conditioned stimulus, (3) the unconditioned
reflex, and (4) the conditioned reflex.
The unconditioned stimulusis a stimulus that has an inborn power to elicit
a reflex. Food in the mouth is such a stimulus. The physiology of the body is such
that when salivary glands are stimulated by food, saliva will flow.(a) Classical conditioning is characterized by the capacity of a stimulus to
elicit a reflex.
(b) The unconditioned stimulus is a stimulus that has an power to elicit a
reflex.Answers: (a) previously neutral; (b) inborn.The conditioned stimulusis created by the learning process. It acquires a
power that is sometimes (not always) similar to that of the unconditioned stimu-
lus. If a tone precedes food in the mouth a number of times, then the tone may