Pavlov Conditioning

Definition

 Pavlov Conditioning or Classical Conditioning is a reflexive or automatic type of learning in which a stimulus acquires the capacity to evoke a response that was originally evoked by another stimulus.

Ivan Pavlov was the first who described the Classical conditioning. So that’s why Classical Conditioning is also often called Pavlov Conditioning.

Ivan Pavlov

Ivan Petrovic Pavlov was born in Ryazan in Russia in 1849. He studied physiology and medicine in a university in St.Petersburg. Later he also studied in Breslau and Leipzig in Germany. Around 1890, when he was already back in St. Petersburg, he was appointed to a professorship of Pharmacology in the Institute of Experimental Medicine at St. Petersburg. At the same time he was the head of the Physiology department. The Soviet Government built a special research laboratory for his works in 1935. Ivan Pavlov died a short time later in 1936.

Ivan Pavlov’s works and studies

Ivan Pavlov was a physiologist and he first noted that the phenomenon of conditioning was not actually psychological. This is surprising because the concept of Classical Conditioning is studied by every psychology student.

Ivan Pavlov studied also digestion, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1904. While Pavlov studied digestion in dogs he recognized that the dogs always begin to salivate when somebody enters the room.  This let Pavlov know that salvation is a reflexive process. The stimuli on which the dogs react are the absence of food and smells. According to his research, he suggested that salivating at the sight of food is an unconditioned reflex, whereas salivating to the expectation of food is a conditioned reflex. He kept focusing on these reflexes and how they are learned, and set out to provoke a conditioned response to a previously neutral stimulus. Pavlov had chosen the sound of a metronome as a neutral stimulus. The dogs hear the noise and right after that the food is presented. After some time he noted that the dogs began to salivate right after they heard the sound.  The result was that the previous neutral stimulus became a conditioned stimulus.

Pavlov’s Conditioning in Brave New World

You can mainly see conditioning in Brave New World in the behavior of the people. The people are conditioned not use their brains. As young babies all people in the state are conditioned in the special Hatchery and Conditioning Centers. For example, they show their babies flowers and books and give them electroshocks so that the babies are conditioned not to like these things.  You can compare Pavlov’s trials on dogs with the trials on the babies with the flowers.

By Enrico Skrlec

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