One kind of conditioning that we recently learned about in psych class is classical conditioning. Classical conditioning is the process of learning something in which someone connects a stimulus with a consequence because of experience. One way that this applies to me is because of the way we trained our cat, Gracie. When we first got her, my mom thought of the idea of shaking her food every time we were going to feed her so would relate the shaking of the food to getting fed. At first I was confused as to why she did this but then one day we couldn’t find her. My mom went to go shake the food and then all of a sudden we found her. Gracie recognized the shaking of the food and therefore thought she was getting fed. She is always hungry so the second she thought she was getting fed she went right to her food dish. Whenever we can’t find her or she wont come inside, all we do is shake the can of food and she runs to her food bowl right away. This has come in handy many times and it works every time.
Since my cat’s food bowl is in our mudroom, whenever we do simple things such as getting our shoes or walking out the door our cat runs to the mudroom and stars meowing because she thinks she is getting fed. After multiple time of being fed she connected the fact that she gets fed when we are in the presence of her food bowl. Whenever we get home from somewhere, Gracie is always waiting for us at the door. She clearly connects the fact that whenever she hears the sound of the car pull into the driveway that we are home.
Whenever we have food on the counter Gracie will jump on the table and try to eat it. We never could get her to stop so my mom started to squirt her with a spray bottle because cats hate water. My cat would freak out and run away. After a few times of doing this, once our cat saw the squirt bottle it would immediately jump off the counter and run away. The cat made a connection between the spray bottle and getting squirted. I think it is incredible that our cat has learned so much just from repeated experiences. After multiple times of doing things she remembers the outcome.