Learning is defined in psychology as a relativly permenant change in behaviour as the result of an experience. Learning is a fundamental and essential process enabling animals and humans to adapt to their changing environments, and thus survive.

Behaviorism is a school of psychology which explains learning by studying behavious which can be observed and measured; Learning is explained through a complex series of stimulus-response connections.Classical conditioning is one of the two main theories which psychologists studying behaviourism use to explain learning.

Classical conditioning was pioneered by a physiologist at the beginning of the twenteith century; Ivan pavlov (see above for picture), whose work in this field was so significant that he won a Nobel prize for it.Pavlov was studying the digestive systems of dogs when he noticed that the dogs salivated before the food was brought into the room, for example when they saw the person who fed them. This observation led Pavlov to hypothysise that if a stimulus which did not usually produce a response was paired with a stimulus which would usually produce a response for a certain number of trials, the presentation of the first stimulus by itself would produce a response.

Pavlov conducted a number of experiments with his dogs that exploored this theory;A bell (conditioned stimulus) was rung just before the food (unconditioned stimulus) was presented. At first the dogs salivated only to the sight of the food (unconditioned response), however after a number of trials the dogs salivated as soon as the bell had been rang (conditioned response): The dogs had been classically conditioned.

The process of classical conditioning can be summerised as follows;

Unconditioned stimulus-------------------------Unconditioned response

The theory of classical conditioning can easily be applied to everyday life , and is often used commercialy in order to make people associate two items/feelings together, for example in