Classical Conditioning Beyond Pavlov

Chapter 6 explores various classical conditioning procedures and their applications. It opens with Watson and Raynor’s experiment with Little Albert, whom they conditioned to fear a white rat by associating it with a loud sound. It then describes an animal model of fear conditioning used to study the role of brain areas such as the amygdala in fear learning. The chapter then explores eyeblink conditioning, which can be achieved in animals and humans by pairing a tone with a puff of air to the cornea. It also explores its dependence on the integrity of the cerebellum and its use in assessing functions in other brain areas. It then discusses autoshaping, which comes in two varieties: sign tracking and goal tracking. It describes an experiment in which some rats, “sign trackers,” tracked stimuli that predicted a reward. Others, “goal trackers,” tracked the location of reward delivery; yet others showed both sign and goal tracking. It then describes research showing that “sign trackers” more easily learned to self-administer cocaine than “goal trackers,” demonstrating the applicability of such research to understanding drug addiction. The chapter concludes with an explanation of counterconditioning, which forms the basis for a psychological treatment of phobias known as systematic desensitization.