This claim ignores research on different forms of Pavlovian conditioning such as sign tracking, goal tracking, sexual conditioning, and conditioning of various forms of defensive behavior that promote effective interactions with the external environment rather than “internal physiology.” The latest edition of the comprehensive text Applied Behavior Analysis (Cooper et al., 2020), for example, includes Skinner’s claim that “reflexes, conditioned or otherwise, are mainly concerned with the internal physiology of the organism” (1953, p. Skinner reflected that line of thinking in his landmark book, Science and Human Behavior (1953), in which he seemed to take pleasure in Bernard Shaw’s irreverent description of Pavlov’s work as just having to do with “the spittle of dogs.” Unfortunately, Skinner’s take on Pavlovian conditioning remains evident in contemporary books on behavior analysis. However, the emphasis on conditioned salivation in teaching about Pavlovian conditioning has promoted the misconception that Pavlovian learning is limited to glandular responses that are of little psychological interest. Learning to link together different features of an object or situation extends the scope of Pavlovian mechanisms well beyond conditioned salivation. Most naturally occurring examples of Pavlovian conditioning involve learning about a CS that has an inherent or pre-existing relation to the US and therefore is not “neutral” or “arbitrary.” Social phobias, fear of public speaking, and fear of intimacy are all learned in the same fashion: The presence of others becomes a signal, or CS, for an aversive outcome, or US, in certain social situations. One feature of the dog (its visual appearance or bark) comes to elicit fear because it is associated with other aspects of the dog (the dog’s bite). Most naturally occurring examples of Pavlovian conditioning involve learning about a CS that has an inherent or pre-existing relation to the US and therefore is not “neutral” or “arbitrary.” When a child becomes fearful of dogs after a dog bite, they are forming the type of within-object association that Vul’fson and Snarskii originally demonstrated. Thus, Pavlovian conditioning in the natural environment involves the type of arrangement that Vul’fson and Snarskii created. Such pairings occur outside the lab only if there is an inherent relationship between the CS and the US. Pavlovian conditioning requires repeated pairings of a CS with a US. The fact that the CS and the US were features of the same object ensured that the two stimuli would be experienced in close temporal proximity, which facilitated their association. Those objects had features that elicited salivation unconditionally and visual features that came to elicit salivation through association with the US features. The dogs in their experiments learned a relationship between different features of the substances or objects that were placed in their mouths. However, that was not the case in Vul’fson’s and Snarskii’s experiments. In a typical diagram, the CS (in this case, a bell) is characterized as a “neutral” stimulus that is initially unrelated to the unconditioned stimulus (US in this case, a steak). The source of the visual CS in the original experiments is highly significant and has broad implications for how Pavlovian conditioning occurs in the natural environment. The novel finding was that after a number of trials, the dogs started salivating at the sight of the substance that was to be placed in their mouth. These substances elicited salivation without training, or unconditionally. A substance such as dry food, sand, or sour water was placed in a dog’s mouth on repeated trials. The experimental protocol was relatively simple. The initial experiments on salivary conditioning were carried out by Pavlov’s research assistants, Sigizmund Vul’fson and Anton Snarskii, who used a visual rather than auditory cue as the CS. Pavlov did not ring a bell as a conditioned stimulus (CS). As Michael Domjan writes, however, CS and US are more often features of the same object or have a pre-existing relationship in the natural world-for example, the sound of dogs barking and the pain of getting bitten. A typical diagram illustrating Pavlovian conditioning, which characterizes the conditioned stimulus, a bell, as neutral and unrelated to the unconditioned stimulus, food. The diagram also perpetuates numerous misconceptions about Pavlovian conditioning. Unfortunately, this diagram does not convey why Pavlovian conditioning remains a core phenomenon in psychology. Pavlovian conditioning remains a popular and important form of learning more than a century after Pavlov accepted the Nobel Prize in 1904 for his work on the digestive system. The diagram below, or something like it, is frequently used to introduce students to the type of learning research pioneered by Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov.
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