began to uncover the actual mechanism of learning, thereby laying the theoretical foundation for behaviorism. The contributions of four particular scientists are Ivan Pavlov, John B. Watson, Edward Lee Thorndike, and B.F. Skinner.

. Through Thorndike used objective methods in his experiments, Watson did not consider him a behaviorist, for he used subjective terms such as satisfying and unsatisfying to describe his observations. For the early behaviorist, all reference to inferred mental states were unscientific and therefore to be avoided. Yet despite its subjective wording, Thorndike's law of effect had laid down another fundamental principle of learning: the importance of reward in the learning process.

as surely as the piece of salmon molded the behavior of Thorndike's cat. Our friends and families control us with their approval or disapproval. Our jobs control us by offering or withholding money. Our schools control us by passing us or failing us thus affecting our access to jobs. Thus Skinner stated outright what Pavlov had merely suggested: that much of our behavior is based not on internal contingencies but based on external ones.

er words, the conditioned response automatically "spreads," or generalizes, to thinks that resemble the conditioned stimulus. An example to this is in Watson's experiment with little Albert's spontaneous fear of rabbits, and other animals that resembles a white rate. The opposite side of the coin from generalization is discrimination that is learning to distinguish among similar stimuli and to respond only to the appropriate one. People learn to discriminate between similar stimuli, between a friendly smile and a malicious grin. When one turns to have reinforcing consequences and the other does not. When I was a little boy I loved the ice cream man. There would be so much noise going up and down my block but I could always hear his music over all the noise. Shaping is a critical process to operant conditioning. Throughout this process there is a positive reinforcement of successive approximations.

st, named Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), found that if he consistently sounded a tone at the same time that he gave a dog food, the dog would eventually salivate to the sound of the tone alert. Through this research he discovered a basic mechanism of learning called the Conditioned Reflex. A Conditioned Reflex is if a neutral stimulus (i.e. the tone) is paired with a nonneutral stimulus (i.e. the food), the organism will eventually respond to the neutral stimulus as it does to the nonneutral stimulus. Perhaps the strongest application of classical conditioning involves emotion. Common experience and careful research both confirm that human emotion conditions very rapidly and easily. Particularly when the emotion is intensely felt or negative in direction, it will condition quickly. His findings raised the possibility that many

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