Pavlov’s experiment generated much research as they identified many conditioning processes such as acquisition, extinction, spontaneous recovery, generalisation and discrimination.
Baron defined acquisition as ‘The process by which a conditioned stimulus acquires the ability to elicit a conditioned response through repeated pairings of an unconditioned stimulus with the conditioned stimulus’. Acquisition tends to happen rapidly at first but then after a while tends to slow down and even out.
At first many psychologists believed that conditioning occurred automatically by the number of conditioned and unconditioned stimulus pairings but this is also affected by other factors. For example, temporal arrangement relates to the timing of the two stimuli and it was found that delayed conditioning whereby the conditioned stimulus precedes the onset of the unconditioned stimulus and continues for the first part of the unconditioned stimulus. In Pavlov’s case the sound would continue until the dog had received the food and began to eat it. This method produces the fastest rate of learning where as backward conditioning is one of the least effective methods where the unconditioned stimulus precedes the conditioned stimulus, for example, the dog would receive the food before the sound was heard.
Extinction is another conditioning process where there is a slow disappearance of the learned response when the unconditioned stimulus is removed, the bell would sound but no food would appear and this would continue until the dog would stop salivating to the sound of the bell.
Spontaneous recovery occurs afters extinction whereby they would slowly give the food to the dog after the sound has been heard and eventually the dog would salivate just to the bell again.
Generalisation is where the dog, after it has been conditioned to the sound would learn to salivate to similar sounds such as buzzers etc.
Discrimination is when the dog is able to perceive the difference between two or more stimuli such as the sound of a bell would make the dog salivate but turning the light on would not.
Classical conditioning has also been used with other animals, for example in 1977 Garcia et al were able to condition an animal to avoid a particular food associated with a painful outcome and so the animal learnt to avoid that food because of it’s conditioned aversion response to it’s smell or taste.
Taste aversion learning has caused problems for Pavlovian conditioning because classical assumes that learning is a gradual process but with taste aversion, learning takes place after just one trial and also in classical conditioning the longer the delay between the neutral stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus the less likely there is to be a learnt association between the two.
Operant conditioning is similar to classical in that it’s training an animal to behave in a certain way although operant is learning by reward rather than association. In this case when the correct behaviour is shown by an animal, it is then rewarded and this helps to reinforce their behaviour.
Between 1874 and 1949 Edward Thorndike studied animal learning and he believed that learning could take place through trial and error and just by association. In his experiment to prove this he placed a hungry cat in a ‘puzzle box’ and left a fish hanging nearby where the cat could see it. The door on the box was then locked by could be opened by a lever which was inside the box. Eventually, and by accident, the cat knocked the lever and escaped to eat the fish. The next time the cat was placed in the box it continued with same behaviours as before but took less time to escape from the box. After a few tries the cat had learned what to do and would escape immediately.
Thorndike believed the cat’s ability to escape from the box involved no understanding of the relationship between pulling the lever and the door opening but simply by trial and learning, where actions, which lead to success are ‘stamped in’ by the positive consequence. Thorndike also concluded, that the response must lead to a positive consequence otherwise it would gradually fade. He called the ‘Law of effect’ where an action, which produces a positive effect, will become stronger.
Skinner then developed this theory further to investigate how reinforcement acts on behaviour. He placed a rat in a box with a lever inside, which, when pressed produced food. A first the rat pressed the lever by accident but soon learned that each time it was pressed, food would appeared, because the rat was rewarded with food each time it pressed the lever it reinforced the likelihood of the rat repeating the behaviour.
It was found that, when an animal operates on the environment there a four possible consequences: Positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punishment and negative punishment.
Positive reinforcement is seen as pleasurable and so increases the chances of the behaviour reoccurring. There are two main types of positive reinforcement: primary and secondary. Primary is the need to live and satisfy basic needs where as secondary reinforcement is where the animal has become associated with the primary reinforcer such as the food tray in the rats box.
Skinner used positive reinforcement in behaviour shaping where by the desired behaviour is broken down into a series of small operants, which are rewarded when performed. Skinner taught pigeons to play a version of ping-pong using food as the positive reinforcement.
Negative reinforcement is the removal of anything unpleasant which increases the chances of the behaviour re-occurring. For example, if Skinners rat box had been electrified and pressing the lever meant it was less likely to be electrified, the rat would be more likely to press the lever.
Positive punishment is anything unpleasant which decreases the chances of the event occurring again where as negative punishment is the removal of something pleasant like food, which decreases the likelihood of the behaviour happening again.
In 1951 Breland and Breland suggested that the principles of operant conditioning derived from laboratory research could be applied to the control of animal behaviour outside the lab. However, after their training they found that some animals no longer repeated the behaviour they had learned. For example, they trained a racoon to pick up coins which it then would deposit into a ‘piggy’ bank for food reinforcement. But, eventually the racoon would not give up the coins but would rub them together in it’s paws and then dip them into the bank before taking them out again, (this is how they behave naturally in their environment). The Brelands found that even after conditioning behaviour will drift back towards instinct after time. The is known as the instinctive drift whereby what an animal learns tends to resemble their instinctive behaviour as animal behaviour is governed by innate predispositions as much as, if not more than by reinforcement.
Because both classical and operant conditioning have been found to work so well with conditioning behaviour into animal, they are now used to treat people with behaviour problems and are used widely in behaviour therapies.
In 1920 Watson and Raynor were able to classically condition a ‘phobia’ into a little boy known as ‘little Albert’, because they found it successful in conditioning the phobia into the boy they thought it would be just as easy to un-condition him and because they were successful, classical conditioning is now commonly used in treating behaviour problems.
Some of the therapies for classical conditioning include systematic desensitisation, Wolpe developed this in 1958 and is a technique based on counter conditioning and attempts to replace the fear response to phobic stimuli with a new response so that it’s incompatible with fear. Systematic desensitisation has been found to have a very high success rate with specific phobias and is also very ethically correct.
Other therapies include implosion therapy whereby the therapist repeatedly exposes the person to vivid mental image of the feared stimulus in the safety of a therapeutic setting.
Flooding is where the individual is forced to confront the object or situation that gives rise to the fear. It has been found to be very effective as in 1960 Wolpe forced an adolescent girl with the fear of cars into the back of a car and drove her around continuously for four hours until her fear completely disappeared and in a review of both implosion therapy and flooding Emmelhamp and Wessels (1975) concluded that both therapies were effective with certain types of phobias although they can increase anxiety particularly with flooding as the procedure may be too traumatic for some patients and so it tends to be used with caution.
Generally it’s viewed that, therapies based on classical conditioning are very appropriate with particular behaviours as they’re effective, the treatment is structured, the goals are clear and the progress is measurable.
Behavioural therapies have also been developed with the help of operant conditioning, these include extinction whereby a maladaptive behaviour is performed by a patient because it’s positively reinforced this gradually then becomes reduced and eventually extinct so that the behaviour no longer occurs, as there is no reward. However, in order for this technique to work the therapist must be able to find the positive reinforcement in order for them to extinguish it.
Selective punishment is where the patient is punished each time they try to perform the unnecessary behaviour. Although this behaviour has been proven to be effective it has many ethical issues surrounding it and so it’s generally preferred to use positive reinforcement in their therapies.
Overall, operant conditioning in both behaviour shaping and therapies, shows that reinforcements are continually needed to help the behaviour remain positively changed where as in classical conditioning both behaviour changes and therapies concentrate on different stimuli that causes a new response that does not need reinforcing and so prove to be more effective in the long run. Because in operant both people and animals would only be changing their behaviour due to a reinforcer and are only likely to show the desired behaviour if it’s reinforced and so this behaviour is unlikely to be a permanent change compared to classical conditioning which has much high chances of remaining.
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Ferguson, K. E., O’Donohue, W. (2001). The Psychology of B.F Skinner. London: Sage publications.
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