Pyasa 1

Up early morning today.. it is 5 am. 24 hours of power cut at home. some problem in wiring and fuse at home. This means that the inverter dragged itself beyond its capacities and ultimately went off at 2 in the morning. This also means that I haven't slept at all for more than 24 hours. Not tired yet.. Used to it..but by choice..not with so much of distraction and discomfort to accompany it. Anyway, i decided that i'm not gonna waste my time anymore (since i already wasted the night lying on the bed and staring at the fan). I have been thinking of writing the following post since a long time now..

So today I'm going to highlight the principle of Classical Conditioning. Every psychology student is well aware of this widely used, tested and applied learning principle .

However, today I'm not going to explain it the traditional Pavlovian way of experiment involving a dog,bell jar and measuring the salivary responses, but i'm just relating it to a recent observation in my daily life.

These days dad and i have split our duties to water plants. Dad waters them 6 in the morning and I, 6 in the evening. It has become a routine now.. 6pm and i'm up on the terrace religiously fulfilling my duty to 'recharge' the plants. However, it is not JUST the plants that i recharge. As days went by, i noticed a routinely visit of crows on the earthen pot kept there to satiate 'their' thirst in the scorching heat. ['their' applies to the bird kingdom, flies and squirrels, however crows seem to rule the 'water supply' in this case]

Classical Conditioning is a basic form of learning in which an original, neutral stimulus by repeated pairing with a stimulus that normally elicits a responses comes to elicit a similar or even identical response. In this, 2 stimulus events become associated in such a way that the occurrence of one event reliably predicts the occurrence of other.

I noticed that as soon as i refill the earthen pot, the crows start lining up on the railing of the balcony and near the pot to consume water.

That gives us our first phase, Before conditioning which can be represented as:

Unconditioned Stimulus(UCS)    --->     Unconditioned Response(UCR)
water                                                    thirst/ [since we can't measure, i'll take it as lining up of crows].

As I decided to observe the behaviour of crows, I made a loud screeching sound of the terrace door near the water area and then shortly after presented water in the pot. This brings us to the second During the conditioning wherein the CS is paired with USC to elicit the UCR:

Conditioned stimulus(CS)  + Unconditioned stimulus (UCS) ---> Unconditioned Response(UCR)
screech of the door                            water                                             lining up of crows

On repeated pairing in the second phase(as shown above) I observed that the crows started lining up for water just on hearing the screeching sound even when the water was not presented. This shows that learning in behaviour has taken place After the Conditioning phase.

 Conditioned stimulus(CS) ---> Conditioned Response(CR)

 screech of the door                         lining up of crows

Well thanks to Classical Conditioning, I made new friends... It's nice to see them drink water! =)

Pyasa

 Watch the original experiment of Classical Conditioning by the Behaviourist Ivan Pavlov.

[ wrote it on May 21st, publishing it today.]

Happy World Environment Day! Please love nature! =D