ABSTRACT
Associative learning is a basic form of learning, typically studied in lower animals; it is concerned with learning about regularities in the external world. Habituation is the simplest form of associative learning and involves learning to ignore uninformative stimuli. In higher mammals at least, habituation involves the formation of an internal representation of the habituated stimulus. Classical conditioning is measured by the response made to the conditioned stimulus. Unconditioned stimulus is nearly always biologically significant events; the function of classical conditioning therefore is to enable the organism to predict such important events as food or pain. If a conditioned stimulus is no longer followed by the unconditioned stimulus the animal ceases to produce the conditioned response and the association is said to have extinguished. If an animal has learnt to respond to a conditioned stimulus, it will also respond, but to a lesser degree, to other similar stimuli; this is known as generalization.
