Ivan Pavlov made the conditioned response famous with his dog experiments.
A conditioned response is a learned response to a stimulus. For example, if an animal hears a bell followed by a loud sound such as a gunshot which stimulates a fright response, eventually the bell alone will produce a fright response. This is the conditioned response.
Pavlov
Classical conditioned response theory was made famous by Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov in 1903. While researching the role of saliva in a dog's digestive system, he discovered the dogs were salivating in anticipation of the meat being presented. He found that some sound or movement was responsible for letting the dogs know food was coming.
Pavlov used various stimuli along with the presentation of meat and soon the dogs were salivating to the stimuli alone. His most famous experiment involved using a bell as an auditory stimulus and when the dogs salivated at the sound of the bell without the presentation of meat this was called a conditioned response.
Human Conditioning
John B. Watson carried Pavlov's work a little further and investigated whether humans could be conditioned. In 1921, using an 11-month-old child he paired a white rat with a loud, frightening sound and found that the child soon developed a fear of rats.
Considerations
Some researchers consider stimulus response reactions as the building blocks for learning while others theorize conditioned responses may be responsible for many human phobias.
Research suggests there is a biological limit to what type of associations can be learned. For example, neither visual nor auditory stimuli could create aversion responses in rats who were given a nausea-inducing drink. They did however learn to associate taste with sickness and avoided foods with a similar taste.
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