conditioning

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n. Psychology.

A process of behavior modification by which a subject comes to associate a desired behavior with a previously unrelated stimulus.

My heart races and my palms sweat during my first attempt to drive again after a traumatic road accident. Alternatively, having discovered that a new joke goes down well at work, I find myself retelling it ad nauseam. These two scenarios are examples of different forms of conditioning. The first is an example of classical conditioning, and involves learning about the predictive relationship between stimuli. As a result of the car accident, the interior of a car, let alone the touch of steering wheel, has become a signal for a traumatic event and thereby elicits a fear reaction through the activation of my autonomic nervous system. By contrast, my new found humour is an example of ‘instrumental’ or ‘operant’ conditioning. In this case, I have learned about the causal relationship between an action, the telling of the joke, and the apparent attention and interest that it elicits in my friends and colleagues, which only serves to reward this tedious behaviour.

Classical conditioning is often referred to as ‘Pavlovian’ because this form of learning was discovered by the renowned Russian physiologist, Pavlov, in his experiments on the neural control of digestion at the end of the nineteenth century. As is well known, Pavlov signalled the presentation of food to his hungry dogs by turning on a stimulus, such a bell, some seconds before the delivery of each meal. Although the bell initially produced little more than orientation towards its source, after a number of pairings with the food this stimulus began to elicit novel behaviour. As soon as the signal came on, the dogs approached the location of the food and started salivating copiously. The occurrence of the responses depended, or were conditional, upon experience of the predictive relationship between the signal and the food, and thus came to be known as ‘conditioned’. Correspondingly, the signal is called a conditioned stimulus, because its property also depends upon learning about the predictive relationship. By contrast, the food is an unconditioned stimulus, because the salivation that it elicits, the unconditioned response, does not depend upon the learning experience. Pavlov also referred to the food as a reinforcer, as it is the event responsible for strengthening the conditioned response. Although it was originally thought that simple pairings of a conditioned stimulus and a reinforcer are sufficient for conditioning, we now know that only signals that are informative about the occurrence of the reinforcer become conditioned. Moreover, conditioning is not always a simple, automatic and non-conscious process and, in certain cases, only occurs in humans when they are already aware of the relationship between signal and reinforcer.

The salivation elicited by the signals for food is an appetitive conditioned response because the reinforcer, the food, is attractive. By contrast, my hypothetical fear response to the car is an example of aversive or defensive conditioning, because the reinforcer in this case, the accident, is noxious and distressing. Pavlovian conditioning affects a gamut of response and behaviour systems, from the sexual evaluation of members of the opposite sex to food preference and aversions. Moreover, this form of conditioning also plays a role not only in behavioural responses but also in the regulatory systems of the body. For example, if drinking a fluid with a particular flavour signals an infusion of glucose into the stomach of hungry rats, that flavour will, in future, reduce blood sugar level in anticipation of the glucose load.

The experimental study of ‘instrumental’ conditioning also started over 100 years ago, but in this case by an American comparative psychologist, Thorndike, who was interested in comparing the learning capacities of different species of animal. Thorndike studied the rate at which a variety of animals learned to operate a latch in order to escape from a cage to eat some food placed outside. These instrumental tasks were subsequently refined over the succeeding decades, most notably by the behaviourist psychologist, Skinner. As in the case of Pavlovian conditioning, the food acted as a reinforcer to strengthen the conditioned response, the operation of the latch, but in the instrumental case through a positive causal relationship between the response and reinforcer. In contrast to Pavlovian conditioning, however, aversive or noxious stimuli cannot act as instrumental reinforcers through a positive relationship with a response. Indeed, when a response causes an aversive outcome, the behaviour is suppressed or punished. For an aversive event, such as a road accident, to reinforce the appropriate instrumental response (careful and defensive driving) the response has to prevent the event happening and thereby allow us to escape or avoid dangerous and unpleasant situations.

There are two sorts of learning process underlying instrumental conditioning. The first process establishes response habits through the acquisition of a connection between an eliciting stimulus and the response. For example, enhancement of the limb muscle reflexes involved in the movements that the rat must make to reach for the latch can be conditioned by arranging for an appropriate change to be reinforced by the delivery of food to a hungry animal. This simple stimulus-response development clearly plays a role in the acquisition of motor skills. Other learning processes are involved in more complex forms of instrumental conditioning, which support goal-directed actions based upon knowledge of the causal relationship between the action and the outcome that it achieves. This type of instrumental conditioning operates when one explicitly plans a course of action to achieve a specific goal.

In summary, the two forms of conditioning, Pavlovian and instrumental, reflect the processes by which we and other animals learn to adjust our behaviour to the predictive and causal structure of our environment. The fact that, in one form or another, both types of conditioning are to be found throughout the animal kingdom, from relatively simple invertebrates to ourselves, is a testimony to their ubiquitous and important adaptive function.

— A. Dickinson

Bibliography

• Dworkin, B. R. (1993). Learning and physiological regulation. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
• Mackintosh, N. J. (1983). Conditioning and associative learning. Oxford University Press, New York

See also Pavlov, Ivan.

Activities that exercise the whole body to improve overall physical fitness, especially aerobic fitness, muscle strength, and flexibility. Conditioning is not primarily concerned with developing a skill. For athletes, it forms part of the preparation period of their training programme. Conditioning enables an athlete to become fit enough to cope with specific training which may be physically very demanding.

n

A form of learning based on the development of a response or set of responses to a stimulus or series of stimuli.

For more information on conditioning, visit Britannica.com.

According to behaviourism in psychology, conditioning is the way in which new connections between stimulus and response are learned, and therefore forms the basic pattern of learning. It comes in two forms. In classical or Pavlovian conditioning (known as type S) an animal such as a dog comes to associate a neutral signal with one which already produces a result, with the consequence that the hitherto neutral stimulus itself produces the result. In the famous case, after becoming associated with food in the mouth (the unconditioned stimulus), the bell (the conditioned stimulus) stimulates the dog to salivate (the conditioned response). In instrumental or operant conditioning (type R) the animal learns to do something to produce the result. The essential behaviourist claim is that this kind of association has its own laws, and can be studied without postulating that the animal has come to know something or expect anything. The claim is that the relationship between stimulus and response is essentially simple and passive, depending only on the temporal contiguity between the stimulus and the reward. Nor is there any need to postulate cognition in the animal. This claim is not, however, borne out in experience: for example, whether an animal performs some learned action on a stimulus can vary with the varying degree to which it now wants the likely result of that action.

1. The process of training or changing behaviour by association and reinforcement. There are two main types: classical conditioning and operant conditioning.

2. The sum total of all the physiological, anatomical, and psychological changes made by an individual in response to a training programme.

3. General training of the whole body to establish aerobic fitness. See also preparation period.

The rudiments of conditioning are familiar to most people. After experiencing a number of pairings of a signal, for example a tone or light, and a reinforcer, in this case food, Ivan Pavlov's (1927) dogs came to salivate to the signal much as they did to the food. Similarly, B. F. Skinner's (1938) rats (see Skinner box) would readily perform some action, such as pressing a lever, that procured food.

Clearly, both these behaviours depend upon learning, in that their development requires the animal to experience a relationship or association between the signal and food in the case of Pavlovian or classical conditioning, and between the action and food in instrumental or operant conditioning. Although the empirical phenomena themselves are not a matter of dispute, the significance of this type of learning is contentious. Traditionally, conditioning represented the cornerstone of the behaviourist's analysis of learning, but with the increasing focus on cognition and information processing, the study of this form of learning has been consigned to a backwater of psychology.

The current neglect seems to be based largely upon the assumption that conditioning is a simple, automatic, and unconscious form of learning that underlies the acquisition of relatively trivial behaviour. Following a thorough survey of human conditioning studies, W. F. Brewer (1974) concluded that there was no good evidence for conditioning in human beings. This surprising claim was based not on our failure to show the appropriate behavioural changes, but on the observation that whenever conditioning-like effects occur, we are aware of the association between the signal or action and the reinforcer. Underlying this argument there appears to be the assumption that, by definition, conditioning must be an unconscious process. But neither the empirical effect itself nor its associated terminology implies such an assumption. Pavlov referred to the signal and its associated response as a 'conditional stimulus' and a 'conditional response' respectively, simply because the acquisition of this reaction was conditional or dependent upon having experienced the relationship between the signal and the food. Similarly, the food can be identified as a reinforcer because, at an empirical level, it appears to be an important agent for strengthening, or reinforcing, the conditional response. However, this terminology has undergone a subtle change in the West, so that one now finds statements to the effect that people and animals can be 'conditioned' and 'reinforced'. Obviously such statements are a travesty of the Pavlovian terminology: a person cannot be conditioned or strengthened, at least not by a conditioning experience. These distortions are important, however, for they reveal a fundamental and widespread belief about the nature of conditioning, namely that it is a passive process to which a person or animal is subjected.

The origin of this belief lies not in the conditioning phenomenon itself, but rather with the initial behaviourist explanations of this type of learning. For instance, E. L. Thorndike (1911) in his famous 'law of effect' argued that following an action by a reinforcer simply strengthens a connection between the stimuli present when the action is performed and the action itself, so that the action reoccurs as a response to these stimuli when they are again presented. This stimulus-response theory has at least two features that bolster the idea that conditioning is a simple and passive process. First, the conditions for learning, and by implication the process underlying such learning, appear simple: in essence, successful conditioning depends just upon the temporal contiguity between the response and reinforcer. Secondly, a conditional response occurs because it is automatically elicited by the appropriate conditional stimulus. Thus, a trained rat presses the lever not because it knows about the relationship between its action and the occurrence of the reinforcer, but rather because the sight of the lever automatically triggers lever pressing. Both these claims turn out to be incorrect on further analysis.

It is a relatively easy matter to show that instrumental conditioning does not necessarily establish a simple habit released by the appropriate stimulus. Stimulus-response theory, by denying the animal any knowledge about the consequences of its actions, implies that conditional behaviour, once established, should be insensitive to any subsequent changes in the value of the reinforcer. We can test this claim by training an animal to perform an action for a particular food before devaluing the food, for example, by establishing quite separately an aversion to the food. This is readily done by inducing nausea shortly after consuming the food. If we now give the animal the opportunity to perform the action that had previously procured the food, stimulus-response theory would anticipate that the vigour of the action should be unaffected by the devaluation of the reinforcer. Not surprisingly, however, the animal is reluctant to perform this action (Adams and Dickinson 1981), indicating that simple instrumental conditioning reflects the acquisition of knowledge about the relationship between an action and the occurrence of the reinforcer rather than establishing a reflexively elicited habit. The deployment of this knowledge in controlling behaviour can then be modified by other relevant information, such as the current value of the reinforcer. Given this perspective, instrumental conditioning can be seen to represent a relatively simple procedure for investigating learning about the consequences of our actions and general purposive and goal-directed behaviour.

Just as our view of the knowledge underlying conditioning has changed from that specified by Thorndike's 'law of effect', so have our theories about the conditions for the acquisition of this knowledge. The 'law of effect' states that simple temporal contiguity between an action and a reinforcer is sufficient for instrumental conditioning, and Pavlov himself argued that a classical conditional stimulus also acquires its properties as a result of contiguous pairings with a reinforcer. It has long been recognized that a system sensitive only to temporal contiguity would often fail to distinguish real causal and predictive relationships from purely fortuitous and coincidental conjunctions, and thus be prone to the development of superstitious beliefs and behaviour. It is now clear, however, that the conditioning mechanisms embody a number of subtle and complex processes designed to counteract the formation of superstitions. For instance, conditioning depends not only upon the temporal relationship between the conditional stimulus or action and the reinforcer, but also upon whether or not the occurrence of the reinforcer is surprising or unexpected. The role of surprise is demonstrated by L. J. Kamin's (1969) 'blocking effect'. If an animal receives conditioning trials in which a conditional stimulus, A, is paired with a reinforcer, it will subsequently show little conditional responding to a second stimulus, X, when a compound of A and X is reinforced. In the initial stage the animal learns to expect the reinforcer following stimulus A, so that its subsequent presentation following the AX compound is fully predicted by stimulus A and hence unsurprising. As a result, minimal conditioning accrues to stimulus X. Conversely, if stimulus A is initially established as a predictor of the non-occurrence of the reinforcer, the presentation of the reinforcer following the AX compound is very surprising and leads to enhanced conditioning to stimulus X (Rescorla 1971). This sensitivity to the surprisingness of the reinforcer will serve to protect us and other animals against the formation of superstitious beliefs and behaviour. Effectively, the conditioning mechanism appears to embody an assumption of minimum sufficient causation; an animal is less likely to attribute the contiguous occurrence of a reinforcer to the presence of a stimulus or the execution of an action if another adequate cause or signal for this reinforcer is also present.

In conclusion, the contemporary view of conditioning is considerably more complex and subtle than that expounded by the early behaviourists. We should not overplay, however, the importance of conditioning as a general model for all learning. There are many examples of non-associative learning that lie outside the scope of conditioning theory. Even so, conditioning studies appear to reveal universal mechanisms by which we and other animals intuitively detect and store information about the causal structure of our environment.

(Published 1987)

— A. Dickinson

Bibliography
• Adams, C. D., and Dickinson, A. (1981). 'Instrumental responding following reinforcer devaluation'. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 33B.
• Brewer, W. F. (1974). 'There is no convincing evidence for operant or classical conditioning in adult humans'. In Weimer, W. B., and Palermo, D. S. (eds.), Cognition and the Symbolic Processes.
• Kamin, L. J. (1969). 'Predictability, surprise, attention and conditioning'. In Campbell, B. A., and Church, R. M. (eds.), Punishment and Aversive Behaviour.
• Pavlov, I. P. (1927). Conditioned Reflexes.
• Rescorla, R. A. (1971). 'Variations in the effectiveness of reinforcement and non-reinforcement following prior inhibitory conditioning'. Learning and Motivation, 2.
• Skinner, B. F. (1938). The Behavior of Organisms.
• Thorndike, E. L. (1911). Animal Intelligence: Experimental Studies.

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1. learning; behavior modification in animals.
2. preparation of young cattle for shipment and entry into a feedlot. The procedure varies but usually includes vaccination against potential pathogens, prophylactic treatment for worms and lice, administration of vitamins and when necessary feeding of antibiotics and introduction to the kind of diet likely to be fed.
3. tenderizing of meat by careful storage at an appropriate temperature for a sufficiently long period.

• aversive c. — behavior modification using an adverse stimulus in response to the inappropriate or undesirable behavior. Called also avoidance.
• classical c. — a form of learning in which a response is elicited by a neutral stimulus which previously had been repeatedly presented in conjunction with the stimulus that originally elicited the response. Called also respondent conditioning, Pavlovian conditioning.
— The concept had its beginnings in experimental techniques for the study of reflexes. The traditional procedure is based on the work of Ivan P. Pavlov, a Russian physiologist. In this technique the experimental subject is a dog that is harnessed in a sound-shielded room. The neutral stimulus is the sound of a metronome or bell which occurs each time the dog is presented with food, and the response is the production of saliva by the dog. Eventually the sound of the bell or metronome produces salivation, even though the stimulus that originally elicited the response (the food) is no longer presented.
• instrumental c. — takes place only after the subject performs a specific act that has been previously designated. The most common form of this conditioning uses an instrument such as a bar that must be pressed by the subject to achieve the delivery of food or other reward.
• odor c. — classical conditioning to odors of essential oils is an element in aromatherapy.
• operant c. — learning in which a particular response is elicited by a stimulus because that response produces desirable consequences (reward).
• Pavlovian c. — see classical conditioning (above).
• respondent c. — see classical conditioning (above).

Quotes:

"All of childhood's unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood." - Maya Angelou

"Every time I say sure when I mean no, every time I smile brightly when I'm exploding with rage, every time I imagine my man's achievement is my own, I know the cheerleader never really died. I feel her shaking her ass inside me and I hear her breathless, girlish voice mutter T-E-A-M, Yea, Team." - Louise Bernikow

"Lord, with what care hast Thou begirt us round! Parents first season us; then schoolmasters deliver us to laws; they send us bound to rules of reason, holy messengers, pulpits and Sundays, sorrow dogging sin, afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes, fine nets and stratagems to catch us in, bibles laid open, millions of surprises, blessings beforehand, ties of gratefulness, the sound of glory ringing in our ears: without, our shame; within, our consciences; angels and grace, eternal hopes and fears. Yet all these fences and their whole array one cunning bosom-sin blows quite away." - George Herbert

"Hardly ever can a youth transferred to the society of his betters unlearn the nasality and other vices of speech bred in him by the associations of his growing years. Hardly ever, indeed, no matter how much money there be in his pocket, can he ever learn to dress like a gentleman-born. The merchants offer their wares as eagerly to him as to the veriest swell, but he simply cannot buy the right things." - William James

"In schools all over the world, little boys learn that their country is the greatest in the world, and the highest honor that could befall them would be to defend it heroically someday. The fact that empathy has traditionally been conditioned out of boys facilitates their obedience to leaders who order them to kill strangers." - Myriam Miedzian

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