Le Chocolate Company

What is your reaction when you see a slab of chocolate like this one?

chocolate_mmm

I don’t know about you, but my mouth waters just like in Pavlov’s experiment.

The original and most famous example of classical conditioning involved the salivary conditioning of Pavlov’s dogs. During his research on the physiology of digestion in dogs, Pavlov noticed that, rather than simply salivating in the presence of meat powder (an innate response to food that he called the unconditioned response), the dogs began to salivate in the presence of the lab technician who normally fed them. Pavlov called these psychic secretions. From this observation he predicted that, if a particular stimulus in the dog’s surroundings were present when the dog was presented with meat powder, then this stimulus would become associated with food and cause salivation on its own. In his initial experiment, Pavlov used a metronome to call the dogs to their food and, after a few repetitions, the dogs started to salivate in response to the metronome. Thus, a neutral stimulus (metronome) became a conditioned stimulus (CS) as a result of consistent pairing with the unconditioned stimulus (US – meat powder in this example). Pavlov referred to this learned relationship as a conditional reflex (now called conditioned response).

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_conditioning

I guess we are conditioned to love chocolate and whenever we see a slab of that luxurious substance (also known as chocolate), we crave it.

All this talk about chocolate is making me hungry, I’m going to have some chocolate now :-D

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