During this unit in psychology we learned about two different types of conditioning. The two types we discussed in class were classical conditioning and operant conditioning. Although these two types of conditioning seem to get mixed up a lot, they are two completely different things.

Classical conditioning is a type of learning that has to do with learning with the association of a stimulus. There are four factors to classical conditioning; unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, conditioned stimulus and conditioned response. The unconditioned stimulus is what naturally causes a response, the example we used in class with the food that was given to the dog. The unconditioned response is what naturally occurs, the example from class was the salivation. The conditioned stimulus normally would have nothing to do with the stimulus but it is connected to the trigger, during class the example was the tone. Finally the conditioned response is what is learned. Classical conditioning follows these four concepts that are distinguished by a behavior being learned through the process.

The other type of conditioning is called operant conditioning. Operant conditioning is when an association is made between the result of an event and the behavior that caused the result. This is different from classical conditioning because due to classical conditioning you have no control over what is being learned. Operant conditioning follows the idea that if you do well, you will receive a reward; therefore you will always do better and try hard in order to receive that reward.

A part of operant conditioning that is very common deals with shaping, which when a person (or reinforcer) reinforces and guides the behavior to produce a favorable outcome or behavior. I have used this concept many times with my dogs at home. When we first got our dogs they were all little puppies, and had no clue how to do anything except bark at all hours of the night and pee on the carpet when no one was looking. My siblings and I made it our goal to train them to do cool tricks and listen to us when we gave them commands. In order to get the dogs to learn the tricks and commands we wanted them to learn we used shaping and operant conditioning. When teaching them to shake our hand we would make them sit, and give them a treat and then they learned that when they would sit they would get a treat. After that we started saying paw, and would tap their paw in order for them to place it in one of our hands. When their paw was in our hands, we would give them a treat. They once again realized that once they did these actions they would get a treat. After a lot of practice and a lot of time, the dogs were able to do more then just bark and break all of their toys. Operant conditioning was used to teach them how to do their tricks. At the time I did not know there was a name for the process that was going on, but after discussing it in class I realized that there is a name for training dogs to do tricks by rewarding them as they excel in what they are doing.