#conditioned stimulus

Conditioned Stimulus: Characteristics and Uses in Psychology

The human being and the rest of animals are active beings, who interact with a medium on which they depend for survival. But why do we do what we do? How do you explain that, for example, when a dog hears a bell starts to salivate or why do we run to seek refuge when we hear an alarm?

This how and why we act as we act is something that has always been of great scientific interest, and that from…

One thing I found incredibly daunting when I started my transition from traditional horsemanship was the array of new vocabulary i’d never heard of before. It made reading some articles a challenge and there was a lot that went over my head or seemed needlessly confusing. I made an index of common terms which I tried to explain in an easy to understand way as I could. 

OPERANT CONDITIONING 

A learning process through which a behavior is learned or modified by reinforcement or punishment aka consequences. An association is created between the behavior and the consequence. Operant conditioning uses reinforcers to increase the probability of a behavior occurring again or punishers to decrease the chance of the behavior occurring.

CLASSICAL CONDITIONING 

A learning process which utilizes association to teach or modify a behavior/response. Typically an unconditioned stimulus is paired with a neutral stimulus until it becomes a conditioned stimulus. E.g Pavlov using the sound of a bell (neutral stimulus) to precede giving the animals food (unconditioned stimulus) eventually causing the dog to salivate at the sound of the bell (an conditioned response to a conditioned stimulus) 

REINFORCERS

Response from the environment or trainer that increase the chance of  a behavior being repeated

PUNISHERS

Responses from the environment that decrease the chance of the behavior being repeated.

UNCONDITIONED STIMULUS

Something that triggers a response in the animal naturally and automatically. E.g food.

CONDITIONED STIMULUS 

Things that do not trigger a natural response in the animal, but through association now provokes a response. E.g dogs becoming excited when they see a lead.

NEUTRAL STIMULUS 

Something that triggers no response in the animal. E.g a lead is a neutral stimulus, it’s through association it becomes a conditioned stimulus

CONDITIONED RESPONSE

A response an animal automatically gives as established through training, a reaction to a previously neutral stimulus. E.g  Pavlov’s Dogs salivating at the sound of a bell.

UNCONDITIONED RESPONSE

In classical conditioning, the response to stimuli are reflex actions, which means that they involve involuntary responses. For example, sneezing when presented with a bunch of flowers. The process begins when when an unconditioned stimulus (UCS) provokes an unconditioned response (UCR). For example James visits his aunt's house and his aunt always has a bunch of flowers in the lounge. Because James has hey-fever he sneezes. Here the UCS is the bunch of flowers and the UCR is James sneezing. It is an unconditioned response because the response to the stimulus is natural. The UCS is then paired with a neutral stimulus (NS), in this case it is James' aunt. The stimulus is neutral because it would not normally produce the UCR. After a few pairings of the NS and the UCR, the NS becomes a conditioned stimulus (CS). Now whenever James sees his aunt he automatically sneezes, regardless of whether the flowers are present or not. James sneezing when just his aunt is present is now a conditioned response (CR).

Related to classical conditioning is extinction and spontaneous recovery. Extinction occurs when the UCS no longer causes the CR. After a few trails of separating the two stimuli the learnt response is extinguished. Spontaneous recovery is when after extinction the association recurs for no apparent reason.

Scientists Identify The Brains “Fear Frequency”

Ever wondered why you get chills down your spine each time you sit in the dentists chair or strap yourself into a rollercoaster? They’reproduced by a conditioned fear response, which can be learned following a bad experience and recalled whenever certain stimuli relating to that event present themselves. While this concept is certainly nothing new, scientists have for the first time identified a…

Latent inhibition is a technical term used in classical conditioning [see also: http://eidetisch.tumblr.com/tagged/classical-conditioning] to refer to the observation that a familiar stimulus takes longer to acquire meaning (as a signal or conditioned stimulus) than a new stimulus.[1]

The term "latent inhibition" dates back to Lubow and Moore (1959).

The LI effect is "latent" in that it is not exhibited in the stimulus pre-exposure phase, but rather in the subsequent test phase.

"Inhibition", here, simply connotes that the effect is expressed in terms of relatively poor learning.

The LI effect is extremely robust, appearing in all mammalian species that have been tested and across many different learning paradigms, thereby suggesting some adaptive advantages, such as protecting the organism from associating irrelevant stimuli with other, more important, events.

Signals that consistently precede food intake can become conditioned stimuli for a set of bodily responses that prepares the body for food and digestion.

These reflexive responses include the secretion of digestive juices into the stomach and the secretion of certain hormones into the blood stream, and they induce a state of hunger.

An example of conditioned hunger is the "appetizer effect."

Any signal that consistently precedes a meal, such as a clock indicating that it is time for dinner, can cause people to feel hungrier than before the signal.

The lateral hypothalamus (LH) is involved in the initiation of eating.

The nigrostriatal pathway, which includes the substantia nigra, the lateral hypothalamus, and the basal ganglia have been shown to be involved in hunger motivation.

Classical conditioning (also Pavlovian conditioning or respondent conditioning) is a form of learning in which the conditioned stimulus or CS, comes to {signal } the occurrence of a second {stimulus}[expect a stimulus...!!!, trigger...], the unconditioned stimulus or US.

Conditioning is usually done by pairing the two stimuli, as in Pavlov’s classic experiments.

[Pavlov, I.P. (1927/1960). Conditional Reflexes. New York: Dover Publications (the 1960 edition is not an unaltered republication of the 1927 translation by Oxford University Press http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Pavlov/]

via: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_conditioning