Alright, so now we're going to get into the process of classical conditioning. I will give you a heads up: this lesson is going to have a lot of new terminology and it might seem overwhelming at first, but what I want you to focus on is just really understanding the process of what is happening here. Because all of these terms, honestly, are quite intuitive once you begin to understand, kind of, logically what is actually happening. So don't get too caught up in, like, memorizing definitions. Try to just go through it and begin to really understand the process.
And catching on to that terminology will come pretty quickly once you understand what's happening here. Alright, so we typically think of classical conditioning as having 3 phases. First, we have our before conditioning phase and every time I say conditioning in this lesson I want you to basically just think of the word learning. So this is the phase before learning is taking place and essentially we're just going to be measuring responses that already exist before we do anything to the animal. So in this phase, we're going to have our unconditioned stimulus or our unlearned stimulus which we're going to abbreviate as US. These abbreviations that we're going to go through are important so do be aware of them, but luckily they're all very intuitive.
They're basically just going to be the first two letters of all these words. So an unconditioned stimulus is going to be a stimulus that elicits a reflexive response. So this is not something that the animal ever has to learn. Now we also are going to have our unconditioned response or the UR and this is basically the reflexive response that is produced by the unconditioned stimulus. So, for example, a piece of meat is an unconditioned stimulus.
An animal does not have to learn how to respond to a piece of meat. And salivating for a dog is an unconditioned response. Dogs will reflexively salivate in the presence of food. Okay? So these are unlearned.
This is an unlearned stimulus and an unlearned response. Quite often what you'll see is that the unconditioned stimulus and unconditioned response reflect something that's kind of biological or innate about that animal. Dogs salivate in the presence of food. They never have to learn to do that. Right?
So those are our unconditioned stimulus and unconditioned response. Now at this phase, we are also going to have what's called a neutral stimulus and this is exactly what it sounds like. It's a stimulus that does not naturally elicit any specific consistent response from the animal. So for example, a bell is a neutral response to a dog and that's one of the things that Pavlov used in his original experiments. But the sound of a bell does not have any inherent meaning to a dog.
Right? Though a dog is not really going to have any specific response to it so that is our neutral stimulus. It basically has no meaning at this time. It's completely neutral. Alright.
That is our before learning phase. Next, we have what are known as the acquisition trials or the acquisition phase. This is basically the phase of conditioning where we are going to be pairing our neutral stimulus and our unconditioned stimulus and essentially this is the phase where learning is actually going to be taking place. Right? So basically what you're going to do is you're going to have your neutral stimulus, so you're going to ring your bell, then you're going to present the dog with the unconditioned stimulus, so some food, and then that is going to be eliciting the unconditioned response.
So at the time or during these acquisition trials, this unconditioned response is still being caused by the meat. You have to have meat present in order for the dog to salivate. So this is basically we're just pairing these two stimuli over and over and then they're going to be producing that unconditioned response. Now one thing to note here is that for the strongest learning to take place, so the fastest learning and the strongest learning, what you want is that your neutral stimulus should precede the unconditioned stimulus. But what you're going to want to do is, you know, ring that bell, wait a couple of seconds, and then present the food.
What you're trying to teach the animal essentially is that this stimulus is signaling or predicting the presence of this stimulus. That's what you're trying to get the animal to understand. So we're going to do that over, you know, days, weeks, even potentially months. We're doing those learning trials over and over. And then finally, we have our after conditioning or after learning phase.
Now at this point, the neutral stimulus elicits the unconditioned response. Because that is happening our terminology is now going to change. So basically the neutral stimulus is now going to be referred to as a conditioned stimulus. So a conditioned stimulus is a previously neutral stimulus that now produces a reliable response. So our bell is now considered a conditioned or a learned stimulus.
We basically learned something about that bell, it's no longer considered neutral to that animal. And then that is going to be producing a conditioned response and the conditioned response is going to be a reaction that is very similar or honestly even identical to the unconditioned response. But it's going to be produced by that conditioned stimulus. So now when our dog is salivating we're going to call that a conditioned response. So honestly even though we have a lot of new terminology here the actual, like, stimuli and behavior is basically all the same. So basically, your neutral stimulus is now called a conditioned stimulus and your unconditioned response is now called a conditioned response but it's all referring to the same stimuli and the same behaviors.
It's just new terminology because learning has taken place. Alright, so that is the actual process of classical conditioning. Again, it is very important for you to understand what each of those words means and be able to understand, what all of these abbreviations refer to. So definitely take your time with that and make sure that you can kind of follow along with that process of conditioning and use all of those terms appropriately. That will be very important moving forward in this chapter.
Alright, great job with that one guys and I'll see you in the next one. Bye bye.