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Thursday, December 2, 2010

EXAMPLES OF CONDITIONED RESPONSES

EXAMPLES OF CONDITIONED RESPONSES
Following Pavlov’s pioneering work, the study of classical conditioning has been taken up in many laboratories around the world. Few of these have made use of dogs as the subjects and salivation as the response, which are merely incidental features of conditioning. The defining feature is the paired presentation of two stimuli – the CS and the US. The presentation of the US is often said to be contingent on (i.e. to depend on) the presentation of the CS. Here are just a few of the wide range of training procedures that employ this contingency:
Conditioned emotional response [conditioned emotional response result of the superimposition of the pairing of a conditioning and an unconditioned stimulus on a baseline of operant or instrumental behaviour]. The experimental animal, usually a rat, is presented with a neutral cue, such as a tone sounding for one minute (the CS), paired with a mild electric shock (US) that occurs just as the tone ends. After several pairings (the exact number will depend on the intensities of tone and shock), the rat’s behaviour changes. It begins to show signs of anxiety, such as freezing and other ‘emotional responses’, when it hears the tone before the shock has occurred. This is the CR.

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