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How does Pavlovian conditioning help animals return to places where food was found?

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Two wild horses graze on tall grass in the open prairie of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, with rolling badlands visible in the background. — Feeding behaviour Wild horses graze in the Badlands of North Dakota.

Pavlovian conditioning plays a crucial role in helping animals return to locations where they have previously found food by associating environmental stimuli with the presence of a resource.1

In this process, stimuli that regularly precede the delivery of food—such as specific visual cues, odors, or landmarks—become conditioned stimuli. Through Pavlovian conditioning, these signals elicit food-related activities, such as approaching or directing attention toward the stimulus. This ensures that animals are drawn back to places where they have successfully fed in the past, effectively minimizing time spent on fruitless searching when resources are abundant.12

While Pavlovian conditioning initiates the approach to these locations, it often works in tandem with other learning mechanisms. For instance, animals may use these conditioned associations to navigate to the general area of a food source, while instrumental conditioning—governed by the law of effect—allows them to refine the complex motor skills or specific sequences of actions required to actually extract or consume the food once they arrive. By enabling animals to anticipate biologically significant events, this form of learning serves as a vital survival tool, allowing them to adjust their behavior to the specific state of their environment.13