Conditioning

Conditioning is learning in which experience changes an organism’s responses to stimuli. Its main forms are classical conditioning, which links stimuli, and operant conditioning, which links behavior with consequences.

Classical conditioning: Learning in which a stimulus comes to elicit a response after being paired with another stimulus. It explains how experience makes one stimulus predict another.
Stimulus: A detectable event or change that can affect an organism's behavior or physiology. Conditioning concerns how responses change when stimuli are experienced.
Ivan Pavlov: A Russian physiologist whose research on digestion revealed conditioned salivary responses in dogs. His experiments made classical conditioning a landmark research program.
Exposure therapy: A psychological treatment that reduces fear by systematically confronting feared cues or situations. It uses learning principles to weaken fear responses and avoidance.
Observational learning: Learning by watching another person's or animal's behavior and its consequences. It can change behavior without direct stimulus pairing or personal reinforcement.
Operant conditioning: Learning in which consequences alter the likelihood of a behavior recurring. It explains how consequences shape responses through experience.
Response (psychology): An organism's observable or measurable reaction to a stimulus or situation. A change in response is the defining outcome of conditioning.
John B. Watson: An American psychologist who helped establish behaviorism and studied learned emotional responses. He extended conditioning research to human behavior and emotion.
Systematic desensitization: A behavioral treatment pairing gradual exposure to feared stimuli with relaxation training. It applies counterconditioning to reduce learned anxiety.
Insight learning: A solution to a problem reached through sudden restructuring of its elements. It contrasts with gradual behavior change through conditioned experience.

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