Follette, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001 4 Clinical Interventions Involving Operant and Respondent Conditioning For instance, test anxiety is a physiological response that can be unlearned if the presentation of tests is repeatedly associated with a stimulus that elicits pleasant emotion in students ( Legge and Harari, 2000) teachers should consistently present nonthreatening testing environments to induce a positive reaction in their students.
In education, the theory of classical conditioning provides the basis for understanding and treating test anxiety, school phobia, and similar conditions. In a controversial experiment, he conditioned a young child named Albert to develop a fear of rats and objects that resembled them. This automatic form of learning is what is called ‘conditioning.’ Watson extended Pavlov's finding into the study of more complex reflexes, such as emotional response.
Later, the learned response to salivate upon the sound of the bell continued even without the presentation of food. In Pavlov's (1927) experiment on animals' digestive systems, he found that dogs learned to salivate when the sound of a bell was repeatedly paired with the presentation of food. The founder of the theory, Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), was a Nobel Prize-winning Russian physiologist and neurologist whose earlier research focused on involuntary reflexes of animals and later extended to children. Phillipson, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition), 2015 Involuntary Learning: The Theory of Classical ConditioningĬlassical conditioning demonstrated involuntary or reflexive learning through association with stimuli. Further investigations are still needed in larger groups of patients with circumscribed lesions to identify which parts of the cerebellum are crucially implicated in the various forms of associative learning. Associative learning is another example on the historical progression from a pure motor point of view to a more global sensorimotor contribution for cerebellar modules. Overall, cerebellar circuits are growingly recognized as critical associative centers for sensory information seen in a broad sense. The contribution of the cerebellum to motor, cognitive, and emotional associative learning may relate to the role of the cerebellum in motor control processing, i.e., correct prediction of upcoming events associated with particular stimuli and/or actions. In addition, a variety of experimental, clinical, and neuroimaging studies based on paradigms that closely relate to classical conditioning revealed that cerebellar disorders have a detrimental effect on cognitive and emotional associative learning as well.
Although the exact neurobiological mechanisms of cerebellar involvement in motor, cognitive, and emotional associative learning remain to be elucidated, enormous progress has been achieved in delineating the neural circuitry involved in eyeblink conditioning as the prototype of motor associative learning. Mario Manto, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition), 2015 ConclusionĬlassical conditioning in animals and humans has undoubtedly contributed to a substantial increase of insights in the neural network subserving various forms of associative learning in the motor, cognitive, and emotional domain.