Classical conditioning is a type of learning that is exhibited. It has a condition stimulant and an unconditioned stimulant. The conditioned stimulant is a neutral stimulant like ringing a bell and the unconditioned response is not learned but is a reaction from the conditioned stimulus, like salivation. A famous experiment done by Pavlov trained dogs to associate the sounds of a bell with food. By ringing a bell and then giving them food, he found that the dogs would salivate. After doing this numerous times, he found that the dogs would salivate whenever they heard the sound of bell even if they weren’t given food. The dogs learned to associate the sound a bell, a conditioned stimulus, with food and saw they would salivate, the unconditional stimulus, with or without food.

In my home, I have seen this happen to my cat. My mom is the one who primarily feeds her each day. Every morning when she wakes up, my mom goes into the kitchen and puts food in my cats bowl. If my mom doesn’t fill up the bowl right away, my cat will follow her until she does. My cat learned that my mom going to the kitchen, the conditioned stimulus, means she gets food, and began to follow her, the unconditioned stimulus, until she got fed. It started out as my cat only doing this in the morning and led to her following my mom around whenever she got hungry. If my cat got hungry and my mom was walking towards the kitchen, then the cat would follow.