Psychology MCAT 2025 – 400 Free Practice Questions to Pass the Exam

Classical conditioning is a learning process that occurs when a neutral stimulus is consistently paired with an unconditioned stimulus, leading to the neutral stimulus eventually eliciting a conditioned response on its own. This phenomenon was famously studied by Ivan Pavlov, who demonstrated that dogs could be trained to salivate in response to a bell if that bell was consistently paired with the presentation of food. Initially, the bell (neutral stimulus) does not provoke any specific response from the dogs. However, once it is repeatedly associated with the arrival of food (unconditioned stimulus), the dogs learn to salivate (conditioned response) just at the sound of the bell.

This concept highlights how behaviors can be learned through association, emphasizing the transformational role of repeated pairings in altering responses to stimuli. It is a foundational idea in behavioral psychology, illustrating that learning can occur without direct reinforcement or punishment, which differentiates it from operant conditioning, where behavior is modified through consequences.