Unconditioned stimulus is a term associated with a philosophy of psychology called behaviorism. This philosophy contends that behaviors are adequately understood as responses to environmental stimuli without examination into internal mental processes.
History
Ivan Pavlov won a Nobel prize for his pioneering discovery of unconditioned stimuli.
Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, discovered the earliest model for behavioral learning during an experiment on canine salivation. Pavlov's dogs responded to an unconditioned stimulus, food, with an unconditioned response, salivation. Pavlov soon noticed, however, that the dogs salivated not only when food was present but when they saw their food handlers.
Theory
Food was the unconditioned stimulus in Pavlov's canine experiments.
Pavlov began to pair food with the sound of a bell. Over time, the bell alone was enough to cause salivation. The dog's association between the bell and food produced an identical behavioral response. Pavlov called this method of learning classical conditioning.
Identification
In Pavlov's canine experiment, food was the unconditioned stimulus and the dog's salivation was the unconditioned response. Once Pavlov introduced a bell in association with food, the bell became the conditioned stimulus and the responsive salivation became a conditioned response.
Tags: unconditioned stimulus, became conditioned, food with, Ivan Pavlov, Pavlov canine