Pavlov’s Dogs and Little Albert

Classical conditioning is a type of learning in which an organism learns to associate stimuli. For example, when there is lightning, there is thunder. Therefore, when a person sees lightning, they are scared because they are expecting thunder to follow due to classical conditioning. One famous experiment that shows classical conditioning perfectly is Pavlov’s experiment with dogs and salivation around food. This experiment was done by having dogs in a controlled environment where the scientists could measure each dog’s level of salivation. Before the conditioning began, the scientists noticed that food produced salivation. When they began using classical conditioning, they would use a neutral stimulus, and an unconditioned stimulus to produce and unconditioned stimulus. In this particular experiment, the neutral stimulus was a tone that signaled food was coming. The unconditioned stimulus is the dog’s food. The two of these together produced the unconditioned response of salivation. This scenario was done multiple times and yield the same response. After the classical conditioning process was done, the neutral stimulus (the tone), which was originally irrelevant, now becomes the conditioned stimulus. This now triggers salivation from the dogs, which is now the conditioned response because it is learned. This process was also used in the famous “Little Albert” experiment. This was were a baby was conditioned to hate rats through classical conditioning. The experiment realized how little Albert disliked loud sounds because they are startling. The experimenter paired the loud sounds with rats. Little Albert soon realized that whenever he saw a rat, there would soon be a loud sound that he disliked. This ended up with little albert generalizing this to all other small furry animals. So whenever he saw one, he would become visibly upset assuming there was a loud sound soon to follow. These experiments can be used to explain other real life scenarios.