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The process of acquiring, developing, educating, establishing, learning, or training new responses in an individual. Used to describe both respondent and operant behavior; in both usages, refers to a change in the frequency or form of behavior as a result of the influence of the environment.
- assertive c. SYN: assertive training.
- aversive c. SYN: aversive training.
- avoidance c. the technique whereby an organism learns to avoid unpleasant or punishing stimuli by learning the appropriate anticipatory response to protect it from further such stimuli. Cf.:escape c.. SYN: avoidance training.
- classical c. a form of learning, as in Pavlov experiments, in which a previously neutral stimulus becomes a conditioned stimulus when presented together with an unconditioned stimulus. Also called stimulus substitution because the new stimulus evokes the response in question. SEE ALSO: respondent c.. SYN: stimulus substitution.
- escape c. the technique whereby an organism learns to terminate unpleasant or punishing stimuli by making the appropriate new response which stops the delivery of such stimuli. Cf.:avoidance c.. SYN: escape training.
- higher order c. the use of a previously conditioned stimulus to condition further responses, in much the same way unconditioned stimuli are used.
- instrumental c. c. in which the response is a prerequisite to achieving some goal; often used as a synonym for operant c., but some psychologists make distinctions in the usages of these two terms.
- operant c. a type of c. developed by Skinner in which an experimenter waits for the target response (head scratching) to be conditioned to occur (emitted) spontaneously, immediately after which the organism is given a reinforcer reward; after this procedure is repeated many times, the frequency of emission of the targeted response will have significantly increased over its pre-experiment base rate. SEE ALSO: schedules of reinforcement, under schedule. SYN: skinnerian c..
- pavlovian c. SYN: respondent c..
- respondent c. a type of c., first studied by I. P. Pavlov, in which a previously neutral stimulus (bell sound) elicits a response (salivation) as a result of pairing it (associating it contiguously in time) a number of times with an unconditioned or natural stimulus for that response (food shown to a hungry dog). SYN: pavlovian c..
- second-order c. the use of a previously successfully conditioned stimulus as the unconditioned stimulus for further c..
- skinnerian c. SYN: operant c..
- trace c. c. when there is no temporal overlap between the c. stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus.
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n.
the establishment of new behaviour by modifying the stimulus/response associations. In classical conditioning a stimulus not normally associated with a particular response is presented together with the stimulus that evokes the response automatically. This is repeated until the first stimulus evokes the response by itself (see conditioned reflex). In operant conditioning a response is rewarded (or punished) each time it occurs, so that in time it comes to occur more (or less) frequently (see reinforcement).
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con·di·tion·ing (kən-dishґən-ing) 1. learning in which a stimulus initially incapable of evoking a certain response acquires the ability to do so by repeated pairing with another stimulus that does elicit the response. Called also classical c., pavlovian c., and respondent c. 2. in physical medicine, improvement of physical condition with a program of exercises; called also physical c.Medical dictionary. 2011.