ood and then the bell is rung repeatedly but no food appears, the dog will soon stop salivating to the bell. Another principle to classical conditioning is the spontaneous recovery. Supposing that a response is classically conditioned then extinguished. If a few hours or days later, the CS is presented again, the CR will probably reappear. As spontaneous recovery is a term used for this temporary return of an extinguished response after a delay. Thus, the elimination of a conditioned response usually requires more than one extinction lesson. Pavlovs dog who was conditioned to salivate to the sound of a bell of one tone may well salivate to a similar sounding bell or a buzzer. Stimulus generalisation is the extension of the conditioned response from the original stimulus to a similar stimuli. The conditioned response to a similar stimulus is not as strong as the response to the original stimulus; the less similar the weaker the response.An animal or person can be taught to choose between stimuli, that is to discriminate stimuli. For example, is a dog is shown a red circle every time he is fed, then he will salivate at the sight of the red circle alone. However, the dog will usually generalise this response to that they may respond to circles of other colours. If we only feed the dog when it sees a red circle but not an orange one, then it will soon learn to respond to red but not orange. The dog would have learnt to discriminate between the two colours. Relating this to humans, we discriminate consistently, relying on everyday life. Such as knowing someones voice. John Watson and Rayner conditioned a baby (Albert) to be afraid of a white rabbit by showing Albert the rabbit and then slamming two metal pipes together behind Albert's head. The pipes produced a very loud, sudden noise that frightened Albert and made him cry. Watson did this several times (multiple trials) until Albert was afraid of the rabbit. Previously he would pet the rab...
