ABSTRACT
The second category of psychological theories we will consider – behavioural learning theories – have their origins in the work of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov and B.F. Skinner. Pavlov famously studied the processes involved in very simple, automatic animal behaviours, for example, salivation in the presence of food and found that those responses that occur spontaneously to a natural (unconditioned) stimulus could be made to happen (conditioned) to a stimulus that was previously neutral, for example, a light. Thus, if you consistently turn the light on just before feeding the animal, then eventually the animal will salivate when the light comes on, even though no food is present. This conditioning can of course be undone. Thus, if you continue to present the light without the food, eventually the animal will stop salivating, a contrary process that is called extinction.
