Introduction

The cognition of animals encompasses their intellectual capacity to acquire a new skill and the potential to apply it wherever needed. Superior intellect in animals demarcates them from the other species in the race of survival. Animals hold the capacity to adapt to their environment by learning or re-shaping pre-existing behaviour. This report aims to analyse two experiments, conducted to study the intellectual capability of animals to adapt to a new behavioural pattern and reshape the learning pathway.

Discussion

Learning to elucidate correct behaviour occurs when a successful association between stimulus and response takes place. Russian psychologist I. Pavlov studied that salivary secretion in dogs is a natural and reflexive response towards food, based on which he performed an experiment to condition the intellectual capability of the dogs to react the same towards another stimulus (Rehman, Mahabadi, Rehman, 2019). It requires intelligence to learn a new association and shape the pathway of behavioural response. The experimenter observed that the primary steps of learning depend on the visibility of the stimulus and the temporal episode between the presentation of a neutral stimulus (in the experiment, the sound of the metronome) and the unconditioned stimulus (food). The experimenter noticed that, on the continuous supply of the conditioned stimuli in the absence of unconditioned stimuli, the elucidated response grows weaker until it completely vanished. In the said experiment, the dog stopped salivating to the sound of the metronome when food was not provided immediately after, in a subsequent number of trials. However, the lost association was retrieved fast when the stimulus was again presented in pairs. The idea behind experiment to study the effects of classical conditioning can be vividly utilized in human lives also, especially in the area of pain perception (Zhang, Lu, Bi & Hu, 2019). Classical conditioning can adjust the levels of pain intensity just as it altered the amount of salivation in dogs. In this experiment, responses were conditioned to be mechanically elicited by pairing the conditioned stimulus with the unconditioned stimulus.

B.F Skinner focused on the responses that are emitted randomly without any significant and identifiable stimuli unlike those in Pavlov’s experiment which were intentionally induced via pairing stimuli sets. He discovered that the effect of a reinforcer can increase the probability of repeating awarding conduct and studied the behaviour of rats to infer such fact (Shahan, 2017). He also noticed that negative reinforcers are also able to nullify undesired response, hence shaping the correct behavioural pathway. The rats, which were used as subjects by the experimenter had the intelligence to find out a way of satiating their hunger and carried on the rewarding behaviour enthusiastically even when they had satisfied their drive. On the other hand, the animals were also able to dodge the electric current by pressing the correct lever whenever alerted with a light and finally sorted the right course of action which will cause them less harm (Cherry,2016). The main challenge of the animals in this experiment was to figure out an unknown environment, cope with it and decipher the correct way to respond. The ability to apprehend and react to a situation highlighting that role of reinforcement and punishment is quintessential in practical life to refurbish the course of learning.

Conclusion

In the discussed experiments, it was seen that the situation made up by the cue stimulus evoked a sequence of response to satiate the drives of the animals, which they were intellectually capable to cope with. Thus, it can be concluded that animals possess the cognitive abilities to establish a new stimulus-response pathway and they can reshape their behaviour by learning to evoke a response as demanded by the circumstances.

References

Cherry, K. (2016). What is operant conditioning and how does it work. Psychology, very well. Retrieved, 7(18), 2019.

Rehman, I., Mahabadi, N., & Rehman, C. I. (2019). Classical Conditioning. In StatPearls [Internet]. StatPearls Publishing.

Shahan, T. A. (2017). Moving beyond reinforcement and response strength. The Behavior Analyst, 40(1), 107- 121.

Zhang, L., Lu, X., Bi, Y., & Hu, L. (2019). Pavlov’s pain: the effect of classical conditioning on pain perception and its clinical implications. Current pain and headache reports, 23(3), 19.