conditioned reflex

…hearing this sound is the conditioned response (CR). The strength of conditioning is measured in terms of the number of drops of saliva the dog secretes during test trials in which food powder is omitted after the bell has rung. The dog’s original response of salivation upon the introduction of…

crystallizes new behaviour patterns. The earliest well-known conditioning experiment was performed by 19th-century Russian physiologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, who conditioned dogs to salivate to the sound of bells.

The elicitation of the conditional response by the conditional stimulus is termed a conditional reflex, the occurrence of which is reinforced by the presentation of the unconditional stimulus (food). In the absence of food, repeated presentation of the conditional stimulus alone will result in the gradual disappearance, or extinction,…

The so-called conditioned reflexes are not reflexes at all but complicated acts of learned behavior. Salivation is one such conditioned reflex; it occurs only when a person is conscious of the presence of food or when one imagines food.

He also promoted conditioned responses as the ideal experimental tool. In 1918 Watson ventured into the relatively unexplored field of infant study. In one of his classic experiments—and one of the most controversial in the history of psychology—he conditioned fear of white rats and other furry objects in…

…that human beings can be conditioned by experience to have specific emotional responses. Descartes himself, for example, had been conditioned to be attracted to cross-eyed women because he had loved a cross-eyed playmate as a child. When he remembered this fact, however, he was able to rid himself of his…

Second is the conditioned reflex stage, in which the response is elicited not by properties intrinsic in the stimulus but by meanings that the stimulus has acquired for the responding organism through experience—for example, Pavlov’s dog’s salivary glands responding to the sound of a bell. Third is the…

This response, known as a conditioned reflex, is a form of learning. The behaviour of the animal is no longer limited by fixed, inherited reflex arcs but can be modified by experience and exposure to an unlimited number of stimuli. The most evolved nervous systems are capable of even higher…