Do you remember the story of Pavlov’s Dog? You know…the one about the food and the bell and the salivating dog…
Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) is acknowledged as the first person to identify the
phenomenon known as classical conditioning. At the time of his discovery, Pavlov
was actually doing some rather unpleasant experiments on dogs involving the
gastric function of the salivary gland. He noticed that the dogs tended to
salivate when anyone in a lab coat approached them and became more interested in
the psychological process that prompted this response. He decided to give a
specific signal, a bell, immediately before offering food to the dogs, causing
salivation. After a number of trials, he only presented the dogs with the bell
and they still salivated.
Food (unconditioned stimulus) -> Salivation (unconditioned response or reflex)
Bell (conditioned stimulus) -> Salivation (conditioned response or reflex)
Thus, conditioning involves the development of an association between two events and enables animals to learn about predictive features of their environment that are relevant to them.
Firstly, if you confuse your dog with different signals, it will take longer for your dog to learn the response. So if you want your dog to associate a voice command with a hand signal, for example, be consistent! Plus, classical conditioning is the first step in clicker training as you want your dog to associate a click with food….later on the clicker is used in operant conditioning (positive reinforcement) but more on that in another article.
Secondly, ensure the conditioned stimulus is given immediately before the unconditioned stimulus. Backwards conditioning generally takes longer.
Thirdly, classical conditioning can be the cause of some behavioural problems, such as a dog getting over-excited when you put on your shoes, pick up the lead or fetch the keys. If you change your patterns of behaviour so they are less predictable, it will be more difficult for your dog to associate the events.
For anyone who’s interested here’s a fun link to a ‘Pavlov’s Dog’ game in which you have to make a dog drool on demand: