Listening audioscript

3. WHAT DOES THE PROFESSOR IMPLY ABOUT THE RESEARCH PAPER? 
4. WHAT WILL THE STUDENT PROBABLY DO? 
 
PASSAGE THREE 
 
Page 204
[ mp3 079-080] 
Questions 5 and 6.
Listen to part of a lecture in a psychology class.
(Professor)
I’d like to talk about two kinds of conditioning this afternoon: classical, or 
Pavlovian conditioning, and operant, or Skinnerian conditioning. Both are 
kinds of learning, in that they involve a relatively permanent change in 
behavior. And both of them are named for the scientist most associated 
with this type of conditioning: Ivan Pavlov, in the case of classical 
conditioning, and B.F. Skinner, in the case of operant conditioning. 
These two types of conditioning require associating behavior with 
environmental stimuli. And of course, stimuli are things that cause a 
response. 
Starting with classical conditioning …um, most of you have heard of 
Pavlov’s dogs, and you know that in his experiments Pavlov sounded a 
tone right before a dog was fed. He eventually managed to provoke the 
dog’s natural reaction to being fed—the salivating behavior—with the 

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LPREP IBT 3 E AudioScript 
58
tone. That is, the dog would salivate —really, it’s mouth would water—at 
nothing more than the sound of the tone. 
Let me review Pavlov’s whole procedure with you. To use the correct 
terminology, he first just used an unconditioned stimulus, the food, 
or…um, I think Pavlov used meat powder. This unconditioned stimulus 
naturally produced the unconditioned and automatic response, the 
salivation. Then, he paired the conditioned stimulus, the tone, with the 
unconditioned stimulus, the meat powder. After some repetition, the dog 
salivated at the sound of the tone in the absence of the food. The 
salivation, in this case, was the conditioned response. It’s important to 
note that this was not a conscious thing. This response was an 
unconscious change in behavior in response to a conditioned stimulus.
Now, operant conditioning can also be beyond conscious thought. But it 
can also be more consciously learned, that is, the subject may actually 
think consciously about its behavior. In operant conditioning… again, this 
is also called Skinnerian conditioning after B.F. Skinner. Well, in operant 
conditioning, the subject, often a rat or pigeon in experiments…uh, but 
this also works with humans quite well…the subject learns to associate 
its actions with certain outcomes and changes its behavior based on 
whether these outcomes are pleasant or unpleasant. That is, whether the 
results are perceived as reward or punishment. 
OK, then, the typical experimental model for operant conditioning is 
called the Skinner Box. It works like this: You put your rat in the box, and 
when it hits a lever, it gets a reward, say a food pellet. It learns to 
associate this action, hitting the lever, with the results, food…uh, and 
when it wants food it hits the lever. The Skinner Box can also function as 
a way of giving out punishments. In this case, when the subject performs 
a certain action, it produces an electric shock. The subject learns to 
associate whatever that action is with unpleasant consequences, and its 
behavior changes to reflect this knowledge. Operant conditioning also 
can involve the idea of negative punishment and reward. This is where 
you remove an unpleasant stimulus if a subject performs a certain action, 
or remove a positive stimulus as a response to an action from the 
subject. 
It’s easy to imagine examples of these types of conditioning in our daily 
lives. Let’s say you have a job with a horrible boss who yells at someone 
every day as soon as he or she gets to the office. Let’s say that it also 
happens that the boss comes in just after nine every day, and that at 
nine o’clock you hear a bell in a clock tower outside your office ring at 
that time. You would almost certainly feel yourself tensing up and feeling 
uncomfortable at the sound of that clock bell every day. And this would 
probably continue to happen even if your boss took a week off. It would 
be a conditioned response. Classical conditioning.
An operant conditioning example would be if you began to make the 
connection, consciously or not, that handing things in early made your 
boss act friendly toward you, or keeping your desk clean made you safe 
from his or her verbal attacks. Until you decided that you’d had enough of 
your boss, you would learn to modify what you did to get the response 
you wanted from your difficult boss.

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LPREP IBT 3 E AudioScript 
59
In the cases of both types of conditioning, there are certain variables that 
greatly affect the rate of learning and the …um, depth…uh, I guess the 
strength and permanence of the behavior modification. 
One factor is the time between the different stimuli. In the Pavlovian 
model, for example, if the tone is heard a long time before the food is 
delivered, it will take a long time for the dog to make the connection. If 
the punishment or reward is long after the target behavior, the subject 
will take much longer to change its behavior, and may not make any 
connection at all if the time delay is long enough.
OK, I realize that this was a very quick overview, so before I go on to 
anything more complicated, I should ask if there are any questions so far. 
Please don’t be shy because that really was fast. The point is to get 
through the basics quickly so we can move on to a more detailed 
discussion, but if I’m losing you, then now is the time to ask for 
clarification.