So to begin with, what are the circumstances that make it more likely that you will develop a conditioned stimulus, conditioned response pattern or acquire sort of a classical conditioning response? Well, there's four components. There's the intensity of the experiences that you're having that amplifies it. There's the biological relevance or connection between conditioned stimulus and its. relevance to the unconditioned stimulus.
Predictiveness, that speaks to the timing of when the conditioned stimulus occurs ahead of time or relative to the unconditioned stimulus. And then lastly, consistency of the pairings. If they're consistently paired, not so consistently paired.
And that influences how quickly and effectively the classical conditioning learning occurs. So to begin with, we have intensity. So the more intense the experience, the faster and the stronger the learning will be, the classical conditioning learning. So a very strong unconditioned stimulus, a very strong unconditioned response means it's really salient or really important to your life.
If you have a very powerful event or experience, then knowing what can predict that becomes more salient to you. Psychologically, even at an unconscious level, it's like, whoa, that was serious. Was there anything that I noticed or could see or heard that would help me prepare for that in the future? And that could all happen at an unconscious level, right?
So if it's a powerful experience, we're more driven and more intent and more... focused even at an unconscious level on being able to predict it, know what's going to happen and prepare for it. So the more intense an event, the more likely and the more you'll learn a pattern or identify the predictors, these conditioned stimuli, and then respond to them to prepare for it or to adapt to those experiences. So we have two examples that hopefully you looked at the videos, that that was easy.
paired with an air gun shot and maybe Pavlov ringing a bell and providing dog food to the dogs. So bell with dog foods that was easy with an air gun shot. So an air gun shot with a BB gun is you know it's something but it's not that intense.
If it was something much more powerful like a like a flap to the head like instead of just a little BB gun so if every time David you know hit the that was easy button he went over and slapped uh brian in the head i think i think brian would learn that that was coming more quickly and he would respond to it more vigorously so as soon as he heard it he'd probably be preparing to stop david from hitting him so that would be a more intense unconditioned stimulus and um more rapid learning and he'd probably have a more intense conditioned response in that he was going to do something more quickly and more and more intensely about it stop it you know uh in terms of pavlov's bell and and dog food well i it's um the dog food is pretty salient i don't know how you could make the the dog food itself which is the unconditioned stimulus i don't know how you could uh make that much more salient to a dog but what you could do is you could make it less salient so instead of actually giving the dog uh some food you you could just let the dog smell the food and that might make the dog still salivate, but you wouldn't actually be giving them the food. So that would be like a less intense and less salient pattern. So if you rang the bell and let the dog smell food, they might not learn, you know, to salivate to a bell nearly so quickly or nearly so strongly as actually getting to eat the food, which is a more salient and intense experience. So those are just two examples of how it works.
more intense unconditioned stimuli and correspondingly more intense unconditioned responses if those those events those types of experiences or events accelerate and make more effective their conditioned learning patterns what about this relevance or biological preparedness well you One of the most common examples they use in the literature is food poisoning. You know, you eat some food that something's wrong with it. It's a bit poison and then you get sick, right?
So you eat something and it makes you sick. But there's often cues. So, you know, there is like something has gone bad, but it could just be coincidentally whatever it is that you've eaten has a certain flavor or a certain smell.
And it's not directly tied to the food poisoning itself. But it's a predictor, right? So you smelled something, then you ate something, and then you got sick.
So we're very fast at learning this. This is like a taste aversion, they say. This is a classical conditioning process that humans and animals learn very quickly. So the next time we encounter that taste or that smell, we're much less likely to want to eat it because it might make us feel, oh, no, I don't feel very good.
So you could have this automatic grumbling. hesitancy in your stomach or like feeling like of you know not feeling so good just from the smell of the food so biologically anyhow we're very prepared to see relationships and identify predictors between like poisoning and sickness things like flavors and smells there's some things we'll quickly identify connections between and other things we won't develop those connections between so easily conditioned stimulus being sort of similar in nature to the unconditioned stimulus. You know, high speed physical movement of an object predicting getting hit and that predicting pain.
So it has to be sort of make sense in a way that the event, this conditioned stimulus that you're seeing that you want to react to in the future has to be at least compatible with the unconditioned stimuli and the unconditioned response. Or if it is, it's much easier to detect. Timing is also important.
So if you have a conditioned stimulus happen shortly before the unconditioned stimulus, you'll learn it much more quickly and much more easily. Otherwise, not so much. So in the case of the That Was Easy button paired with a gunshot, air gunshot, a BB gun.
So if, as David did, David would press the button and then very quickly shoot Brian. So very little time passed. So there's a pretty clear pairing between those two. I hear the sound, then I feel some little BB gun pain. If on the other hand, David, you know, pressed the button, waited five minutes and then shot him, a lot of things could happen in between then, between the sound of the that was easy and the getting shot.
So that makes it more difficult to detect and learn the connection between the conditioned stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus. So too much time passes, the underlying prediction or patterning or association might not be detected. Same thing with the bell. If you ring the bell and then you wait 10 minutes before giving the dog any food, maybe a whole bunch of sounds and smells and different activities have gone on and the dog wouldn't know that it was the bell that was predicting the dog food presentation. It could be any number of things.
Okay, and then the last thing, quite consistent with these other ones, is consistency or repetition. So if that was easy button, you hit it, that was easy, and then you shoot the person, and you do this consistently every time, then you see the connection. You automatically detect, whoa, to respond.
Brian should do something. But if sometimes... that that was easy button critically getting shot and sometimes it didn't, then that would make it more difficult to establish a condition stimulus, condition response, because the organism in this case, or the creature in this case, Brian, might not be detecting that connection or that association.
And so consistency is important or speeds up the learning process. We can, technically we can learn, develop classical conditioning responses, even if it's not consistent all the time. But the learning process, especially early on, is very helpful for it to happen every time or almost every time. It makes the learning much better, much quicker.
And same for the number of pairings. If David pressed a button and then immediately shot. Brian and he did it three times that might you know over a week that might not teach Brian the prediction that that that was a That was a warning that he was about to be shot and he might not develop that condition stimulus condition responses quickly But if on the other hand is it's he's experienced it five times ten times twenty times Then it's more likely he'll detect the pattern and develop that condition response to the that was he's bill so these are the four conditions or circumstances that speed up and make more stronger and more effective the learning process in terms of identifying predictors of important events.
So condition stimuli, what was a neutral thing is not a neutral thing anymore because it predicts something important, an unconditioned stimuli, which leads to an unconditioned response. So the condition stimuli takes on importance and starts to cause conditioned responses. Okay, so that was the learning process. This is sometimes called the unlearning process, but that might not be fair.
It's probably fair to say that you just stop responding to the CS. So, and how it usually happens is pretty straightforward. The conditioned stimulus keeps happening, but it's no longer paired with an unconditioned stimulus.
And this, so in this case, in this example here, what we have is So for the first month, David would press the That Was Easy button and then shoot Brian. So fine. But then the experiment was done.
He proved his point. So he stopped. He still likes the sound of the That Was Easy button and he gets a bit of kick out of it. But he never shoots Brian afterwards.
And in that second month, at first, Brian would flinch and cringe thinking he was going to be shot. Right. But then.
you know maybe after the first week he's just less likely to cringe or flinch when he hears the button and then by the end of the second month maybe he never does it at all so he hears the button but he knows he's learned that he's not going to get shot right away so he stops responding in that conditioned response way so he no longer flinches he no longer cringes at the sound of the bat disease button so that is the weakening and grant and eventual disappearance of the conditioned response, or the learned response. So just repeated exposure to the conditioned stimuli without the unconditioned stimulus following it. And this is a graphical pattern of that.
The learning process is the first half of the graph and the extinction process is the second half of the graph. The same thing applies to Pavlov's bell. So if he rang the bell and never gave the dog food, Maybe at first, the first few times or several times, the dog would start to salivate.
Soon the bell rang. But when no food came and he did it again and he did it again and he did it again, pretty soon the dog would basically just stop salivating less and less to the sound of the bell and eventually not at all. That's the extinction process.
That this learned response was like erased, that it was no longer existed now because you've erased the process. But it turns out that's not quite true. Instead, you can actually demonstrate this condition, stimulus, condition, response pattern.
You can show that it's still there. You just need special situations or circumstances to show that the person still has that capacity in them. So that's it for that part of the lecture.