Classical Conditioning

Description of the Strategy

Classical conditioning is a procedure used to study behavioral change. The procedure was developed around 1900 by the Russian physiologist Ivan P. Pavlov in the course of his research on the physiology of digestion. The defining feature of the procedure is that the presentation of an eliciting stimulus is dependent upon the prior occurrence of a relatively “neutral” stimulus. In Pavlov's laboratory, food commonly served as the eliciting stimulus, with salivation as the elicited response, and events such as the sound of a ticking metronome or the sight of a rotating black square served as neutral stimuli. After several pairings of the neutral stimulus with the eliciting stimulus, the neutral stimulus began to evoke salivation prior to the presentation ...