Page 34 - Zoo Animal Learning and Training

6 1 Learning Theory

VetBooks.ir witnessed yourself. Keepers at most zoos and (conditioning), the once‐neutral stimulus
becomes the conditioned stimulus and causes
aquariums wear keys on their belt loops. When
they walk, the keys make a distinct sound. An
branch can cause the capuchin to feel pain).
animal that is naive to the zoo (just weaned a conditioned response (just seeing a tree
from its mother and now eating with the adults This process also occurs in humans. Let’s
for example) might not notice the sound of look at a classic study.
keys jingling. Thus, the sound of keys is a neu- In 1913, a farm boy from South Carolina
tral stimulus: one that elicits no response and who had a passion for animals, outlined his
thus no meaning. Food is the unconditioned thoughts after about a decade of research in
stimulus. It requires no conditioning to elicit a the area of psychology. His conclusion was
response (in this case, salivation). The animal’s that psychology should be the study of behav­
salivation is the unconditioned response, iour and not the study of consciousness or
because if you present the animal with food, it mental processes. The farm boy was John
will salivate automatically (without training). Watson and the paper that outlined his belief
After multiple pairings of the jingling of keys and coined the term ‘behaviourism’ was
with feeding, the once‐neutral stimulus (the ‘Psychology as the Behaviourist Views it’.
sound of keys) is now the conditioned stimu­ Although Watson spent over a decade doing
lus and causes a conditioned response (salivat­ research at John’s Hopkins University, a single
ing at the sound of the keys). study received the most attention: the study
Let’s look at a second example. This time with Little Albert. In this study, Watson and
try to label the neutral stimulus, uncondi­ his assistant, Rosalie Rayner, showed a healthy
tioned stimulus, unconditioned response, nine‐month‐old infant, ‘Little Albert’, a rat, a
conditioned response, and the conditioned rabbit, a dog, and a monkey. Because he didn’t
stimulus. have exposure to these animals, Albert didn’t
Monkeys, in general, are great animals to cry. To show that one can condition fear,
watch because they are so active. They are Watson paired these animals with a loud
always involved in a fight of some sort, some­ noise (a hammer that he would strike against
times one that includes weapons. Once, I was a steel bar). For example, when Albert touched
commissioned to watch a group of capuchins the rat, they made the clanging sound. After
for a behaviour project not related to condi­ multiple pairings, the infant cried and avoided
tioning. I noticed that two individuals were the rat even when there wasn’t a loud noise.
fighting; George picked up a tree branch and After the experiments, Watson wrote,
used it to hit Declan on the head. At first, ‘Give me a dozen healthy infants, well
Declan did not react to the tree branch coming formed, and my own specified world to bring
towards him. However, after George hit him a them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one
few times with it, Declan started to flinch in at random and train him to become any type
pain and even would flinch in pain when the of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer,
wind would move the branches on trees. artist, merchant‐chief, and, yes even beggar‐
Do you think you labelled them correctly? man and thief, regardless of his talents,
Here is the answer: penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations,
The tree branch started out as a neutral and race of his ancestors’ (Watson 1924, p. 104).
stimulus because it had no meaning to Declan In the next sentence, he writes, ‘I am going
prior to conditioning. Tree branches are nor­ beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have
mally benign items that dangle from trunks. my advocates of the contrary and they have
The unconditioned stimulus is getting hit. The been doing it for many thousands of years’
unconditioned response is the pain the indi­ (Watson 1924, p. 104). Watson believed that
vidual felt because there is no conditioning introspective psychologists, like Freud, made
required to make an animal react to pain. untenable assumptions about behaviour.
After pairing the tree branch with the pain Watson and Rayner (1920) even poked fun at