When it came to trying to understand learning, you would think that perhaps psychologists actively reached and sought out that information. Ironically, the first of the learning theories came about by pure accident. A physiologist by the name of Ivan Pavlov was working in his laboratory studying the salivation of dogs and to understand the digestive system of dogs.
Nothing at all to do with psychology or learning. And through his work, he learned that animals, dogs at the time, which he later extrapolated to us, to human beings, have a system of associative learning, a process in which learning occurs whereby we associate a stimuli, in his case it was the ringing of a bell. or the dog associated the ring of the bell with a consequence and ultimately began anticipating that consequence.
So let's talk a little bit about that study with Pavlov and his dogs. So the way this study worked was that Pavlov would, initially he would be bringing his dog's food in a bowl. And obviously when the dogs would see the food in the bowl, they would start to drool into this tube.
One day Pavlov walked in and the bowl was empty. There was no food in it. And suddenly he turned around and the dog was drooling. And he had a eureka moment.
And he said the dog must have learned to associate the bowl with the fact that there would be a reward in the environment or a reaction in the environment of food. and started to drool. From this he created his classic condition model. And the way it works is that he took a neutral stimulus, which was the bell that we saw in the previous picture, and prior he would ring the bell, then he would bring the dog food, the dog would then drool. Now, anytime I give a dog food, He's naturally going to drool.
It's an unconditioned stimulus, the food itself. Unconditioned meaning it's unlearned. The stimulus itself is reflexive, as we said earlier. It's natural or instinctual for a dog to drool when it sees food. And the unconditioned response, as we said, would be this drooling.
So unconditioned stimulus is the food. Unconditioned response is drooling. Pavlov introduces a neutral stimulus. which is the ringing of a bell, which if I ring a bell for a dog on any given day, he would kind of look at me funny.
Why are you ringing a bell? It does nothing for me, it's just the bell. But when I pair the ringing of the bell with the food, and then the dog will drool, and I repeat that process several times in what he called the acquisition phase of learning, eventually, I can remove the food altogether and just ring that bell. And as I ring that bell, let's go back, as I ring that bell, the dog will start to drool. I now.
have my conditioned stimulus, which is the ringing of the bell, and a conditioned response, which is the drooling. And let's not get confused here. The drooling is both the unconstrained conditioned stimulus because it's natural when it's paired with the food. But once it gets paired with the neutral stimulus of the bell, the bell becomes something different. The bell becomes this conditioned stimulus and the drooling is now referred to as conditioned response because it is in response to that bell.
So this in brief is Ivan Pavlov's model of classical conditioning, that as I ring a bell, the dog will drool and learning has actually occurred. Pavlov in his research found that we could generalize not just from the bell being let's say a high pitched bell, ding ding ding ding ding ding. He might be able to generalize the drooling of the dog to a lower pitched bell, ding ding ding ding ding or maybe even a light blinking or any other source that he could generalize out from the original condition.
Just as a side note, there was research done by a very famous psychologist whose name was Watson who investigated the development of fear in children with a baby called little Albert. And he created a phobia in this child by pairing a loud noise with a rabbit. Initially the boy was not afraid of the rabbit, it was neutral, he liked the rabbit.
Then they made a very loud noise. which is a unconditioned stimulus to create an unconditioned response of fear. And eventually, when they brought the rabbit to the boy, the rabbit became a conditioned stimulus and led to a conditioned response of fear.
And in this case, Watson generalized from the rabbit to a dog, to a furry animal, to many other furry things, and that was when learning was generalized. At times, after a series of presenting this, ringing the bell, for example, to the dog, after 10 days, eventually the dog will forget that it was associated with the food, and extinction will occur. And this is when we lose the conditioned response.
In conducting his research, Pavlov found that he could... transfer the learning from the bell to, and generalize it to other conditions as well. So if initially he used a high-pitched bell, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, he was able to experiment with a low-pitched bell, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, and find that the learning occurred in this condition as well, and this was referred to as generalization. So in terms of a phobia, I might develop a phobia from being in a elevator because it was, initially the elevator was neutral for me.
And one day I got stuck inside of the elevator and that created a lot of fear in me. And now I developed this fear of closed spaces. I might generalize not just from being in an elevator, but maybe I now have a fear of being in a subway car or being in an airplane.
Generalize is out from the one condition to other conditions and this is what Pavlov found in his original studies. He also found that if he presented the conditioned stimulus, which again if you remember in his study, the conditioned stimulus was ringing of that bell. If he presented the bell without the food for let's say five days in a row, eventually the dog would realize, wait a minute, I've been drooling for this bell the whole time. Expecting food to come, but I had figured out that food never came.
And so extinction might occur, whereby the conditioned stimulus is presented, the bell, without the food, the unconditioned stimulus, and eventually the conditioned response, the drooling, will extinguish or become extinct. So this is another feature of the classical conditioning model. that Pavlov presented in his original studies that was taken forward by many other researchers, notably John Watson in his research with Little Albert that you might need to brush up on as well.
And we learn a lot from Pavlov and apply it into our lives in many ways, and hopefully you can apply it in terms of your preparation and studies for the CLEP exam.