In psychologist robert rescorla's classical conditioning experiment, one group of rats experienced a tone just before each of 20
shocks. a second group of rats experienced the same number of tone-shock pairings, plus an additional 20 shocks with no tone. rescorla found that the rats in the first group showed a much stronger conditioned fear response than the rats in the second group. how did rescorla explain this finding?
The answer is the tone was a more reliable predictor of the shock for the first group of rats. In addition, if a shock is always preceded by a tone and then sometimes also preceded by a light that accompanies the tone the rat will react with fear to the tone but not to the light. The classical conditioning theory includes learning a new behavior via the procedure of association. In simple expressions, the two stimuli are related together to yield a newly learned reaction in a person or animal.
