Classical conditioning is a type of learning where an innate response to one stimulus transfers to a neutral stimulus after repeated pairings. Ivan Pavlov discovered classical conditioning accidentally in the early 1900s when his dogs began to salivate before being fed, in response to stimuli in the environment that preceded feeding. Classical conditioning involves pairing an unconditioned stimulus that naturally elicits a response with a neutral stimulus, repeatedly, until the neutral stimulus comes to elicit the same response on its own.

1. Classical Conditioning

2. Description:
•If a stimulus that results in an emotional
response is repeated alongside another
stimulus which does not cause an
emotional response, eventually the
second stimulus will result in the same
emotional response. Classical
Conditioning is thus “learning by
association.”

3. The beginning
• Classical conditioning was
discovered by accident in the early
1900s by Russian physiologist Ivan
Petrovich Pavlov. Pavlov was
studying how saliva aids the
digestive process. He would give a
dog some food and measure the
amount of saliva the dog produced
while it ate the meal. After the dog
had gone through this procedure a
few times, however, it would begin
to salivate before receiving any food.
Pavlov spent the rest of his life
studying this basic type of
associative learning, which is now
called classical conditioning or
Pavlovian conditioning.

4. Classical Conditioning
Classical conditioning is a type of learning in which an animal’s natural response to
one object or sensory stimulus transfers to another stimulus. This illustration
shows how a dog can learn to salivate to the sound of a tuning fork, an experiment
first carried out in the early 1900s by Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. For
conditioning to occur, the pairing of the food with the tuning fork (step 3 in the
illustration) must be repeated many times, so that the dog eventually learns to
associate the two items.

5. The conditioning process usually follows the
same general procedure. Suppose a
psychologist wants to condition a dog to
salivate at the sound of a bell. Before
conditioning, an unconditioned stimulus
(food in the mouth) automatically produces
an unconditioned response (salivation) in
the dog. The term unconditioned indicates
that there is an unlearned, or inborn,
connection between the stimulus and the
response. During conditioning, the
experimenter rings a bell and then gives
food to the dog. The bell is called the
neutral stimulus because it does not initially
produce any salivation response in the dog.
As the experimenter repeats the bell-food
association over and over again, however,
the bell alone eventually causes the dog to
salivate. The dog has learned to associate
the bell with the food. The bell has become
a conditioned stimulus, and the dog’s
salivation to the sound of the bell is called a
conditioned response.

6. Application to humans

7. Thank you
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