HI please help me with the following psychology task on Ivan Pavlov's "Pavlov's dogs"

Question

I need help writing the: 

 

1) Unconditioned stimulus
2) Unconditioned response
3) Conditioned stimulus
4) Conditioned response
5) Reinforcer

 

6) Independent variable 

7) Dependent variable 

8) reinforcer  

Answer 1

Pavlov's experiment is very simple: he repeatedly rang a bell at the time he fed his dogs, until he no longer needed to present food to have the dogs salivate.  In essence, they learned the sound of a bell meant they were going to be fed.

 

So, let's examine this experiment in the terms of classical conditioning you're asking about.

 

An unconditioned stimulus is something that produces an unconditioned response.  Both of these terms have unconditioned, meaning they occur naturally without any influence of the experimenter.  In the case of Pavlov's dogs, the unconditioned stimulus was the smell of the food, which would naturally evoke the physiological response of salivation - the unconditioned response.

 

What Pavlov began to notice is that the dogs would start to salivate in absence of food or smell, meaning that the natural response could be evoked through other means.  This lead him to his famous experiment with the bell.

 

In this case, the sound of a bell, which was rung each time the food was presented, became the conditioned stimulus.  A bell does not mean in a natural setting that you are going to get food, meaning the animals had to learn the association between the sound and food, making it conditioned.  The conditioned response thus became the dogs salivating at the ring of a bell, in absence of food.

 

Now, the term reinforcer cannot be applied directly to Pavlov's dogs because the original experiment did not have one.  Reinforcers are simply a reward (or removal of an aversive stimulus), which increases the behavior you are trying to produce.  Giving a treat to a dog after they catch a frisbee or learn to shake would be a good example of a reinforcer.

 

There are basically two independent variables (IV) in Pavlov's experiment.  The first would be the unconditioned stimulus, or the smell of the food.  This IV has a matching dependent variable of the dog salivating.  You can think of it as the dog salivating depends on the presence of food prior to conditioning.  The second IV is the sound of the bell ringing, which comes to also bring about salivation after the dog is conditioned to the stimulus.