Conditioning

Conditioning is a term used in psychology to refer to two specific types of associative learning as well as to the operant and classical conditioning procedures which produce that learning. Very generally, operant conditioning involves administering or withholding reinforcements based on the performance of a targeted response, and classical conditioning involves pairing a stimulus that naturally elicits a response with one that does not until the second stimulus elicits a response like the first. Both of these procedures enabled the scientific study of associative learning, or the forming of connections between two or more stimuli. The goal of conditioning research is to discover basic laws of learning and memory in animals and humans.