ABSTRACT
Most investigations of the learning process involve what has come to be known as excitatory conditioning. At the simplest level, this refers to the association of a previously unimportant event (e.g., the conditioned stimulus, CS) with an event that has significance to the organism (e.g., the unconditioned stimulus, UCS). Once this occurs, the previously unimportant event also takes on significance. The significance of the CS can be measured in a number of ways, but in the classical conditioning paradigm the primary measure is the emergence of the conditioned response.
