Chapter 7- Learning

This chapter had some interesting topics in it. I particularally found sections on conditioning and punishments to be interesting.

According to the book, classical conditioning is a type of learning in which one learns how to link two or more stimuli and anticipate events. This involves an unconditioned response, an unconditioned stimulus, a neutral stimulus, a conditioned response, and a conditioned stimulus. A very simple example of this would be a dog sees food (unconditioned stimulus) and its mouth starts to water (unconditioned response). The same dog later hears a sound (neutral stimulus) and its mouth remains normal (no response). Later the dog hears the same sound (neutral stimulus) at the same time the food (unconditioned stimulus) is brought out; which causes the dog's mouth to water (unconditioned response). Even later, the sound is created and the dog's mouth waters because it now associates that sound with food. Therefore, making the sound a conditioned stimulus and the mouth watering a conditioned response. This same technique can be modified to real life situations such as to get drug addicts to stop their addiction to basically just about everything.