Conditioned reflex — a stable connection between a random signal and an unconditioned reflex, resulting from their repeated coincidences, one of the types of associative learning. Conditioned reflexes are not congenital, they arise during the life of an individual and are not fixed genetically, are not inherited. The concept of «conditioned reflex» was introduced by Academician I.P. Pavlov. Conditioned reflex according to I.P. Pavlov, this is the triggering of an unconditioned reflex to a conditioned stimulus (signal) as a result of repeated coincidence (combination) of the signal and the unconditioned reflex, and the conditioned stimulus must act first, performing the function of a signal about what will follow it.
I.P. Pavlov conducted most of his studies on dogs, his most famous experiments were the study of salivation in response to a light bulb or the sound of a bell. When a dog sees food, its salivary glands begin to salivate. This happens all the time and in any dog, it is an unconditioned reflex. If the dog hears a call, at first it has an orienting reaction (the dog tenses up and turns its head), but over time this reaction disappears, and the dog no longer reacts to the call. However, if the bell rang regularly at the moment of feeding, or rather, right in front of it, then after a while the dog developed a conditioned reflex: the bell itself began to cause salivation in it. The more such repetitions, the faster the conditioned reflex is developed. On the other hand, if the call ceases to be reinforced by food, then after a while the reflex fades away and is forgotten.
The mechanism of the formation of a conditioned reflex is the appearance in the brain of two foci of excitation and the formation of a temporary nervous connection between them.
However, there is a famous anecdote. One monkey explains to another what a conditioned reflex is: “Look, I will press this button now, and that guy in a white coat will immediately react and give me a banana.”
There is a significant area of acquired behavior that is formed on the basis of other mechanisms. So, it turned out that, unlike a conditioned reflex, in which the appearance of a reaction to a conditioned signal is always preceded by its reinforcement, the animal can form a reaction that was reinforced in the past. after its manifestations: not as a signal of what will happen, but as a reinforcement of what the animal has already done.
This mechanism is called operant conditioning. Operant conditioning can be seen as a kind of combinational reflexes, where there is a stable connection between a certain kind of behavior and its consequences, namely its positive or negative reinforcement. In operant conditioning, it is not the salivation of the dog that is studied, but its behavior: for example, under what conditions the dog will run up to the door and at the door, for example, bark three times.