Pavlov and Watson

Ivan Pavlov

Pavlov was studying how he could make a dog salivate without the presence of food when he developed his theory of classical conditioning. He conducted his experiment by first ringing a bell and immediately after giving food to the dog so the dog got used to it and even before the food was present and the bell rang, the dog started to salivate. The conditioned stimulus used was the bell, the food was the unconditioned stimulus and the salivation of the dog was the response. Extinction was predicted by Darwin in his theory of evolution and it means that organisms of the same specie start to die and there are more death rates than birth rates so the specie sooner or later comes to an end. Extinction happens when the unconditional stimulus does not happen that much with the conditioned stimulus. The response to specific stimuli is stimulus generalizations and in the other hand, learning to respond to a specific stimulus is stimulus discrimination. One limitation that the experiment had was that it could work differently with other humans and the dog was operated so he was not a good example. What Pavlov theorized was responding conditioning and the learning by association.

John B. Watson

Watson studied “Little Albert” by showing furry animals like a white rat to him to see how he reacted but he did not do anything so he then made loud noises when he showed the animals so then the baby became afraid of them and cried when he saw one. The white rat is the conditioned stimulus of the experiment, the loud noise the unconditional stimulus, and as a response they had Little Albert crying. The limitations of this experiment were that it was unethical, only one child was used, and it was never done again. Watson’s law of frequency has to do with association, the more often things are linked, the more association there will be.  The law of recency is that what happens more recently will be more associated and remembered because it’s more recent. Watson stated that behaviorism had everything to do with psychology and is determined by how people act and what is around them.

   

http://palaeo.gly.bris.ac.uk/Palaeofiles/Triassic/extinction.htm

class notes on chart

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1904/pavlov-bio.html