5 Pavlovian Conditioning Life-Hacks
Pavlovian conditioning, also known as associative learning or classical conditioning, is the field of studying how we associative events, especially emotional ones, with each other. The stereotypical example is training a dog to salivate to the ringing of a bell (as Pavlov did in the early 20th century), after it has been presented with numerous presentations of the bell ring followed by food. In the terminology of the field, the bell has become a conditional stimulus for the unconditioned stimulus (food), and has begun evoking an unconditioned response (salivation) in anticipation of the food.
This article will review five important conditioning phenomena, and how understanding them can help you improve your life!
In a typical Pavlovian trace conditioning experiment, an animal might be presented with some sound or light or other stimulus, followed by a delayed presentation of a reward or punishment (e.g. food or sweetened water, or bitter water). The researcher then uses one of various behavioural metrics to assess how quickly the animal has learned that the stimulus is followed by an outcome.
A consistent finding is that the longer the duration between the stimulus and the reward or punishment, the slower the animal (including humans) learns.
How is this relevant to our lives? — because often we find ourselves in situations wherein we work towards a goal, for which the reward is very far in the future. We study for a diploma, lift weights to grow muscle, eat salads to lose weight, and save money for retirement. In each of these cases, the eventual pay-off is far in the future, which affects our ability to stay motivated.
So how can we alleviate this motivational disconnect? The answer is to consciously plan the reward structure of your life, such that you reward your own good behaviour right after it occurs. This can include taking a warm bath after writing an essay, treating yourself to nice food after training in the gym, or rewarding yourself with a nice tech-gadget for every large lump of money you put in your savings account.
Generalisation of Learning is another crucial conditioning effect. As the name suggests, it involves generalising the connections between two events to similar events. As an example, if we get burnt by a hot stove, we will recoil from touching another hot stove — regardless of whether it is gas or electric.
The pathological examples of this are of course over-generalisation (e.g. based on human group identities, or projecting previous traumas and insecurities onto a new romantic partner), as well as under-generalisation — which is essentially inflexibility in the light of change.
The conditioning field has found that the level of generalisation of learning is directly proportional to so called stimulus similarity. The more we believe that two events or things are similar, the more we synchronise learning about one with learning about the other.
Hence, a practical step in treating over-generalisation is to concentrate on attributes that are unique to some event or person. One might, for example, alleviate fear of dogs by focusing on how the dog that bit you as a child had been beaten by a stick — and hence that your neighbour’s dog isn’t the same beast. Conversely, discerning how events, things, or people are more similar than we expect can counteract a tendency to under-generalise.
The Context is the term that Pavlovian conditioning researchers use for all our habitual physical and mental surroundings. The context plays an important effect in conditioning — acting essentially as an anchor or scaffolding for subconscious associations. Its effects can be glimpsed through varied phenomena, such as how smokers often lose their craving during long flights — only for it to resume the moment they land and know they can smoke. Similarly, most people find working on their bed difficult due to the constant tendency to procrastinate. This, from the eyes of conditioning, is because we have associated the bed with leisure and relaxation. Finally, many people who undergo addiction treatments relapse when they are back in their familiar surroundings. The take-away here is to be aware of what your surroundings mean — and to plan where you need to be (both physically and mentally) to fulfill your plans.
Conditioning research focuses not only on how two events are connected in our minds, but how this learning influences other associations — even when the other events or things are not physically present. This is called mediated conditioning, and forms the foundation for subconscious conditioning processes. As a concrete example, an experiment for mediated conditioning might involve presenting an animal with a specific food in a red-coloured room hundreds of times. The animal is then presented with a noxious smell in the aforesaid room. When the animal is then presented with the same type of food again in a differrent, blue room, it recoils. Why? It recoils, because the food reminds it of the red room, which it has now connected with the noxious smell.
These types of labyrinthine connections between events are ubiquitous in our lives. From subconscious advertising, to getting upset with something our spouse did yet not being able to put it into words — until we realise in the shower that it reminded us of some long-passed, negative experience.
As we do not have direct access to these latent mental connections, the practical advice is to simply be aware of our propensity to form them. The next time you are weary of a situation or are gripped by an emotion you can’t quite verbalise, you can take a moment to assess whether its one or two steps removed from something that might explain your reaction!
Latent inhibition is the process whereby the brain learns to ignore familiar, repetitive, and emotionally neutral events over time, especially in the context of not associating them as the cause of any novel events. It makes sense: if something new and unexpected happens around you, it probably isn’t due to a factor that has been continuously present in your life.
That is the brain has, in order to raise its ability to learn important things quickly, evolved mental heuristics for connecting familiar and unfamiliar things more slowly. For instance, most of us connect rain and lightning (novel events) with a thunderstorm (also novel), and don’t waste time trying to see its relation to the socks we wore that day.
What can we do with this fact? — We can use it to improve our ability to learn quickly by increasing novelty in our lives. Whether the goal is to quit smoking or finally actually read a page from a textbook instead of staring into nothingness while sitting by it, finding a manner in which to see a situation as novel can help. This can be colour-coding notes, working from a new cafe, or consciously considering what parts of a situation you don’t understand.
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