Development Psychology

Several learning theories and are going to be looked making connections to illustrate some of the points made. The theories looked at are; Classical Conditioning, Behaviourism, Social Learning and Constructivism.

Classical Conditioning

The main theorist who has looked at Classical Conditioning is Ivan Pavlov. Classical Conditioning is all about learning through association.

Most of Pavlov's experiments were carried out using dogs. Pavlov recognised that dogs that were hungry would salivate at the sight of food, but if a bell was rung before it would have no relevance. Pavlov conducted an experiment in which he rang a bell just before he fed the dogs. After several trials the dogs began to associate the sound of the bell with being fed. They then began to salivate just at the sound of the bell because they knew that they were going to be fed straight after.

The bell is known as the conditioned stimulus because it is conditional when paired with an unconditioned stimulus. The...