Ivan Pavlov was physiological doctor and an academic in field as well. He became famous from a certain experiment in which the idea of classical conditioning was developed. Classical conditioning is a type of learning in which an organism learns to associate stimuli, Pavlov was able to demonstrate this using a dog, a bell, and food. Before starting the experiment, Pavlov noticed that the food caused the dog to salivate. He labeled the food as the unconditioned stimulus and the salivation as the unconditioned response. The reason for labels is to display that all the stimulus and the response are not manipulated by Pavlov. He would then condition the dog by ringing a bell when serving the dog food over a period of time. The bell is labeled the neutral stimulus because the stimulus doesn’t serve any purpose besides being stimulus. Eventually the bell becomes conditioned stimulus because every time the dog hears a bell it assumes it is going to be fed. This results in the dog salivating everytime it hears the bell, which is conditioned response. This was revolutionary for the time because it shows subconscious learning that can be examined.
My last year in highschool I took a psychology course and my teacher had us participate in a similar experiment to show just how real classical conditioning is. The unconditioned stimulus in the experiment was exercise and unconditioned response was an increase in heart rate. We then incorporated the neutral stimulus, a bell, to signal the commencement of the exercise. The exercise was only jumping jacks for thirty seconds but there was still a noticeable jump in heart rate. After ten trials of repetitively doing jumping jacks, we measure the student’s heart rate after simply ringing the bell. As expected, her heart rate had increased almost as much as it had during the exercise. Similar to Pavlov’s experiment, the bell was the conditioned stimulus because it resulted in the conditioned response, the increase in heart rate. Subconsciously her bodied recognized that it should increase heart rate because the bell means there is going to be physical activity. Although it doesn’t seem like she actually learned anything, her brain learned that it needs to increase heart rate in order to adapt to the current environment.
The experiment your psychology class participated in while in high school was extremely interesting. What really stands out to me is the fact that the class was consciously aware of the experiment going on but was still unable to resist the conditioning. This makes me wonder if there are any mental or physical situations you can consciously ignore the conditioning as it takes place! For instance, maybe conditioning the body would be easier than knowingly conditioning an entire movement.