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Eyeblink Experiment

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I found several things about this week’s assigned article by Watson & Rayner (1920) fascinating, but one thing that stood out in my mind was the transfer of the fear response to an alternate stimulus. As we learned in our text, we know that a transfer can occur between similar stimulus and this is known as generalization in classical conditioning (Mazur, 2013). Within our text, Mazur (2013) describes an eyeblink experiment where rabbits were given a shock (US) near their eye and this was repeatedly paired with a tone (CS) which was played at 1,200-Hz. Later, in order to test for generalization, the rabbits were presented with random tones ranging from 400-Hz to 2,000-Hz. Not surprisingly, the data showed that the highest percentage of CRs …show more content…
While I understand that all of the items elicited some type of the response, the rabbit seemed to elicited the biggest transfer when compared to the dog, the fur coat, the wool, the researcher’s hair and the Santa mask (Watson & Rayner, 1920). As we know with generalization, similarity is important in order for a strong transfer to occur. Additionally, we learned with the Little Albert experiment that an emotional response can be conditioned using two different senses (auditory and visual) in order to create the fear based response (Watson et al., 1920). So, while varying senses don’t appear to inhibit the ability to condition a fear response, I am curious if varying senses might influence the strength of a transferred stimulus. For example, if a fear response has been conditioned using a toy firetruck that makes a specific sound, and you want to transfer that fear response to a new toy (one that looks similar but makes no noise and then one that looks different but sounds similar), would there would be a difference in response between the two. I’m assuming the answer to this would be tied to how the subject categorizes the stimulus in their own mind. Meaning, did they perceive the CS as “all toys”, “red toys” or simply “toys that make

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