Classical Conditioning in the Classroom

Classical Conditioning

Ever wonder why you may reach for your phone when you hear someone else’s phone go off that happens to have the same ringtone as you? Or how cats are trained not to jump on furniture? Classical conditioning is the answer. Classical conditioning is the way in which behavior is taught through association.

How Conditioning Works

For example, a cat naturally doesn’t care about a couch and will climb on it all day if it wanted to. The couch in this case would be the Neutral Stimulus (NS) because it elicits no natural response from the cat. Anybody who knows anything about cats knows cats hate getting prayed with water. The spray bottle is the Unconditioned Stimulus (US) because it naturally elicits an Unconditioned Response (UR) which is running away. Now imagine if we begin to consistently spray the cat with water every time it jumps up on couch. Eventually, the cat will associate the couch with getting sprayed with water and won’t go on the couch anymore. The NS that the cat didn’t care about has now become the Conditioned Stimulus (CS) because we taught it to associate a harmless couch with the feeling of getting sprayed. This aversion to the couch out of fear is the Conditioned Response (CR) we were looking for.

Over time, the cat may Discriminate the couch with other pieces of furniture and refrain from jumping on those too. Consistency is key as well, however. After some time, the cat may quit responding to the association and this conditioning would experience Extinction. In this case, it’s important to condition again to elicit Spontaneous Recovery.

Conditioning for Educators

Can you identify what the NS, US, UR, CS, and CR is?

When I personally was a kid growing up in the classroom, my peers and I had so much energy and would constantly talk while the teacher was talking. My teacher found a way to safely condition us to stop talking at inappropriate times by turning off the lights and lecturing us. Every time our teacher would turn off the lights, she would explain how disrespectful we were being towards our fellow classmates and to us and that made us feel extremely embarrassed and quiet. After days of doing that, whenever we got too noisy, as soon as the lights got turned off, we all immediately stopped talking and then knew we were being disrespectful.

- - - - NS: The lights
      - US: Getting lectured
      - UR: Feeling embarrassed
      - CS: The lights
      - CR: Feeling embarrassed

Why this is Important

Classical conditioning can be an easy and non-invasive way to elicit or discourage a specific behavior from students. In my past experience, my teacher successfully gained control back of the noisy classroom until we understood that talking out of turn is disrespectful and we shouldn’t do that. Teachers everywhere should take advantage of such a great psychology technique to indirectly better their students!

Social Attachment and Parenting

Some Reflection…

When was the first time you were separated from your parents for an extended amount of time? Maybe you were staying at grandma’s house for the night or maybe it was your first day of preschool or kindergarten. Do you remember how you reacted or how your parents recall you reacted? Psychology tells us that how every human is born with an innate need for social interaction and attachment.

Infantile Attachment

As humans, we rely on bodily contact to form social connections at younger ages as opposed to forming connections with those who provide nourishment. Once we are born, we all seek attachment but unfortunately, sometimes that is not always the case. Recall to the questions I asked before and try to remember how you reacted when this connection with your parents was detached. While with almost every child there is distress upon separation, with most children, the return of their caregiver comforts them almost immediately. With children that have a more insecure attachment with their caregiver, they will continue to be in distress once reunited. Regardless, when children are neglected from making any connection whatsoever at a young age, they potentially may grow up withdrawn, frightened, or unable to develop speech.

How Parenting Impacts Development (Usually)

When growing up and developing these relationships with their caregivers, children may be parented in an authoritarian, permissive, and/or authoritative manner. This is when a parent may be very strict, submissive, or a mix between the two respectively. Commonly, when a child develops in an authoritarian environment, they potentially develop lower self-esteem. In a permissive household where their every need is provided, children may not develop enough self-reliance throughout their childhood. While this isn’t confirmed, consistently we see that in households that uphold authoritative parenting with a mix of both benefit the child the most by giving them more social competence.

Pay Attention – You Can’t Afford to Miss This

First, a Test

In one of my lectures here at Penn State, a professor of mine gave the entire class a task that you can also try out for yourself!

- Take out your stopwatch app on your phone
- Time how long it takes you to count down from 10-1 and then immediately go up from a-j (10, 9, 8…h, i, j)
- Now alternate between each descending number and each sequential letter and time it (10, a, 9, b, 8, c…)
- Compare your two times

Well… How well did you do?

Just like most of my class and me, there’s a good chance you didn’t do as well as you did with the first sequence. As humans, it is almost impossible to multitask as shown here in this little experiment. Our minds work much better focused on one task rather than trying to divide our cognitive attention between two things simultaneously. While this may feel like just a drawback, psychophysics tells us that there are also several benefits from selective attention.

Attention and Psychophysics

Psychophysics focuses around how our minds psychologically experience different stimuli in our environment such as the brightness of a light or the volume of a sound. There is so much going on in our environment at every given moment that it is literally impossible to process it all. For example, think of everything your body is physically touching right now. It’s impossible to consciously focus on the chair you’re sitting in, every light shining around you, the shoes on your feet and so on. Our minds are adapted to put mental effort into important things while ignoring the things that are not. This is why you stop feeling your shoes after you initially put them on. Sensory adaptation ignores the stimuli that has been constantly there. However, this mental and natural ability to focus on the important stimuli showcases our selective attention.

Attention has several benefits and drawbacks in our every day life. As Dr. Harry Haladjian puts it, “we need not be conscious of this attentive processing for it to influence behavior — that’s why we can navigate effortlessly around our home” (Haladjian). This emphasizes that not all pieces of information need to be consciously focused on for our minds to be able to process them.

The Drawbacks of Selective Attention

Unfortunately, our attention isn’t always the most reliable it can be. Whenever our selective attention is extremely focused, we can experience what is called “change blindness”. In other words, when we are preoccupied with something and our attention is fully invested in one thing, we can fail to observe other huge changes in our environment. This is why it is much more dangerous for a new driver to talk and drive than it is for people who have had their licenses for longer. They are so focused on driving that trying to multitask and pay attention to both the road and their friend is almost impossible. For the experienced driver, while it is still dangerous, driving comes more natural and second-nature to them; thus, they can better hold a conversation and be alert for changes on the road.While being taught of this very topic, my psychology professor at Penn State presented to the class this video:

The whole lecture hall laughed at how average people could be so blind to such a drastic change in their environment. Little did we know, while we were so preoccupied focusing on the video, our professor went into the hallway and proceeded to change his dress shirt from white to black. Even though we have been watching him lecture for over 45 minutes, hardly anyone in the lecture hall of 300 noticed his shirt had completely changed once he resumed lecturing.

Our brains are wired to work smarter and not harder in order to get you the information you need every day. It’s up to you to consciously observe life and the little things around you.

Works Cited

777Skeptic. YouTube, 26 Aug. 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBPG_OBgTWg.

Haladjian, Harry Haroutioun, and Carlos Montemayor. “The Evolution of Conscious Attention.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 23 Feb. 2016, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-consciousness/201602/the-evolution-conscious-attention.