Which experiment involves the use of classical conditioning? knowing that a student fears exams, the instructor wears a bright red shirt only on exam day. every exam day, to see how long it is before the red shirt becomes an object of fear to the student Orewarding a boy for finishing his vegetables with ice cream and counting how many nights of reinforcement are required before he voluntarily eats his vegetables blindfolding someone and timing him to see how long he takes to find a button hidden in a room determining how long it takes a person to learn how to knit if he is only allowed to watch YouTube videos of people knitting
The Correct Answer and Explanation is :
The correct answer is: “Knowing that a student fears exams, the instructor wears a bright red shirt only on exam day. Every exam day, to see how long it is before the red shirt becomes an object of fear to the student.”
This scenario involves classical conditioning, a learning process first described by Ivan Pavlov. In classical conditioning, a neutral stimulus (something that doesn’t initially cause a response) is paired with an unconditioned stimulus (something that naturally triggers a response), eventually causing the neutral stimulus to evoke the same response on its own.
In this experiment:
- The red shirt is the neutral stimulus at the start. It does not initially cause fear in the student.
- The exam is the unconditioned stimulus that naturally causes anxiety or fear in the student, as exams often bring stress and worry.
- Over time, by consistently wearing the red shirt only on exam days, the student may begin to associate the red shirt with the stress and fear of the exam. The red shirt becomes a conditioned stimulus, which triggers a conditioned fear response, even when there is no exam.
This experiment illustrates how associative learning works: a person or animal learns to associate a previously neutral stimulus (like the red shirt) with an emotional response (fear) through repeated pairing with another stimulus (the exam) that already provokes that response. Once the association is made, the neutral stimulus can evoke the same response, even in the absence of the original unconditioned stimulus.
Other options, such as rewarding a boy with ice cream for eating vegetables, involve operant conditioning, which focuses on reinforcing behavior through rewards or punishments. The timing of finding a button in a room or learning to knit from videos involves cognitive learning or problem-solving skills, but they do not primarily involve the associative learning process of classical conditioning.