Lecture 1 Theories

Unfortunately as I hadn't any internet connection last week, I couldn't post any new blog. So this week I'll try to amend this and write more then usually :)

I think it would be good, when I continue there, where I stoped the past week. In order to do this, I'm going to show 2 different learning theories connected to the basic issues, we talked about before...

1. Theory:
Pavlov' Dogs: classical conditioning

In this theory, we basically observe the unconditioned and conditioned stimuli to the brain and thereupon the conditioned response from the correspondent animal.
Ivan Pavlov experimented with dogs to observe the connection between those stimuli and response.
The idea was to offer the dogs food, which is in this case an unconditioned stimulus, because food is the infinite (unilimited) value. Pavlov rang a bell to call the dogs for feeding and to see their reactions to the bell. As he realized that there was no reaction he decided to rang the bell and by the way to show them the food so the dogs started to probe saliva, when they saw the food and on the same time hear the bell. In this case the bell is the conditioned stimulus, because the dogs only showed reaction, when it appeared in connection with food.
Afterwards he repeated this action severe times, until the dogs began to probe saliva by only hearing the sound of the bell. This shows that the salivating activity of the dogs is an conditioned response to the stimuli coming from the outer world (environment). The reason is that, the dogs can't control their saliva, it occurs immediately when they hear the sound of the bell, because they only experienced it in connection to food and expect that when the bell occurs the food will occur too.

So in order to the basic issues, I told you the past week, can you guys tell me, whether this theory is nature or nurture, continuous or discontinuous, universal or culture-specific and finally whether it is active and passive. I would appreciate it, when you give me the answer and tell me why you think that it is like that... See you soon :)