Pavlov's Discovery of Conditioning

This mode of learning was demonstrated by the experiments of Ivan Pavlov, who decided to
research conditioning after discovering during separate gastric tests that his dog subjects began
to salivate not only when meat powder was presented to them, but more significantly, when the
person feeding them came into proximity with them. The dogs had been inadvertently trained
through classical conditioning to associate the person feeding them with the food itself, and
reacted in a similar way (salivation) to the feeders. This is known as a stimulus-response (SR),
when salivation becomes a responsive action to the stimulus of the person feeding the dogs:

At the start of the experiments:

 The Unconditioned/Neutral Stimulus (US/NS) is the person arriving to feed the dogs
before the salivation as a result of their presence had began.
 The Unconditioned Response (UR) was for the dogs not to salivate.

By the end of the experiments, when the unconditioned stimulus and responses had been
conditioned:

 The Conditioned Stimulus (CS) becomes the person arriving to feed the dogs, which
stimulates the Conditioned Response:
 The Conditioned Response (CR) becomes salivation (normally a reflex action to aid
digestion when feeding is going to begin) at the sight of the person.

On disovering this associative learning on the part of the dogs, Pavlov decided to carry out
further research specific to conditioning...