Theories of Learning

Abstract

After a quite short period of time the dogs learned to associate one phenomenon with another: the sound with the food. This form of learning is not a function of the conscious brain, like learning to write or use a word processor, but of the autonomic nervous system which functions largely outside its control. Pavlov had set out to study the digestive system of dogs, one aspect of which is salivation. In the process he stumbled across the phenomenon of respondent conditioning when he found his experiments sabotaged by the dogs salivating ahead of schedule, that is, at the sound of the approaching assistant rather than when they got the food he was bringing. They had quickly learned to associate the food with the feeder. Before proceeding further let us pause to introduce some basic terms and notation. Salivation is a behaviour that is automatically elicited by the presentation of food. As such it is a response to a stimulus, and this finds notational representation as follows: