Question

Three-year-old Josh has been classically conditioned to salivate to a bell by pairing the sound of the bell with a squirt of lemon juice into Josh's mouth. We now clap our hands and then ring the bell. Little Josh will soon learn to salivate when we clap our hands through

a. higher order conditioning
b. instrumental conditioning
c. response chaining
d. the law of effect

Answer 1

Little Josh will learn to salivate when hands are clapped through higher order conditioning, where the bell (an already conditioned stimulus) is paired with clapping (a new neutral stimulus) to create a new conditioned response.

Step-by-step explanation:

The student asked about the process by which little Josh, a three-year-old, could learn to salivate to the sound of hand clapping, which is paired with a bell that he has been previously conditioned to respond to with salivation due to being paired with lemon juice. This learning process is called higher order conditioning, where a conditioned stimulus (CS) is turned into a higher-order CS by being paired with another neutral stimulus. In the case described, the bell is the initial CS that Josh has learned to associate with the unconditioned stimulus (lemon juice), resulting in the conditioned response (salivation). When hand clapping is introduced before the bell and this pairing is repeated, Josh begins to associate the hand clapping with the bell, and by extension, with the lemon juice, leading Josh to salivate in response to the hand clapping.