Famous Experiment
ESL Podcast: Merry Christmas and happy new year everyone! In this ESL podcast we talk about classical conditioning. Learn about psychology while learning great terms and phrases in English.
Classical ConditioningESL Reading
| Classical conditioning was first demonstrated by Ivan Pavlov. To demonstrate this, he would take a neutral stimulus, one that elicits no behavioral response from the animal under investigation, and present it together with a “significant” stimulus, one that does elicit a natural response. He hypothesized that if the two stimuli were presented together enough times, the animal would learn to respond to the “neutral” stimulus in the same way it did naturally to the “significant stimulus. This is exactly what he observed. In his most famous experiment, he rang a bell and gave a dog meat powder at the same time. The meat powder would naturally make the dog salivate. The bell originally did nothing. After enough trials, the dog learned to associate the bell with the meat powder. The dog would start to salivate every time he heard the bell ring, even if no meat powder was present. |
Phrases and Vocabulary used:
Neutral: Neutral has many meanings, but here it means, “not causing a reaction”. Generally things that are neutral don’t effect the surrounding environment. In chemistry, things that are neutral don’t react with other things. If you are “neutral” on some topic, it means you don’t feel strongly either way and have no real opinion about it.
Stimulus: Anything that causes a response.
Music can be used a stimulus to get someone to feel like dancing.
Elicit: to get or obtain something. If you elicit a response from an animal it means you get the animal to respond.
Hypothesized: An educated guess. This word is used a lot by scientists when they try to guess the outcome of their experiment. It is basically a prediction as to what will happen.
Salivate: Mouth watering. When animals, including people, smell food, their mouth starts to water to prepare them for eating. This is called salivating.
Trials: each time you perform the activity in an experiment is called a trial. In our example, each time the experimenter gave the dog meat powder while ringing the bell would be considered one trial.
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