Classical Conditioning

What it is

Ivan Pavlov noticed during his research on digestion that dogs produced saliva in response to cues linked with food. He read this as a learned and temporary reflex, and later found that an outside stimulus paired in time with an ordinary reflex could become the signal for a new conditioned reflex. Robert Rescorla's 1968 experiments showed that pairing alone is not enough: a signal produced conditioning when it predicted the event, and none when the event was just as likely without it.

In effect

In the article on classical conditioning, it is the subject itself; the article on operant conditioning sets it beside learning from the consequences of behaviour.

What it does not say

It concerns learning about signals and does not cover learning from the consequences of one's own actions, which is operant conditioning. A learned response can fade through extinction, and extinction does not erase the original learning.

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