Conditioning

:This article is about the psychological term. Conditioning is also an engineering term for putting something (for example, a communications link) into a particular condition. It is also a math term; the conditioning of a matrix is expressed by its condition number. Conditioning is also a term used in athletics for exercises designed to improve one's general fitness.

Related Topics:
Engineering - Math - Matrix - Condition number

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Conditioning is a psychological term for what Ivan Pavlov described as the learning of "conditional" behavior. Most psychologists believe that there are two types of conditioning: classical conditioning and operant conditioning.

Related Topics:
Psychological - Ivan Pavlov - Learning - Behavior - Classical conditioning - Operant conditioning

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As psychologists use the term, conditioning is less prescriptive than descriptive. While Pavlov explicitly conditioned his dogs to salivate to tones, the interest in Pavlov's work is that his explicit conditioning procedures are considered useful laboratory models for what happens in the natural world. People also display natural food-related behavior in response to stimuli that are reliably paired or associated with food. Pavlov merely provided a procedure for modeling and investigating these natural phenomena in the laboratory. Pavlov's model is still used to investigate the natural behavior of organisms.

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Similarly, reinforcement and punishment are understood to be natural phenomena occurring moment by moment in the lives of all animals. Laboratory studies are designed to enlighten the investigator into the nature of these phenomena rather than to discover better techniques of social, political, or economic control.

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