Conditioned Reflexes - A different view

    You may have read about the famous Pavlov's Experiment on conditioned reflexes (Read about Pavlov's Experiment). In it, Pavlov, by conditioning and practicing, induced a response in a dog on the sound of an ordinary bell and the dog began to salivate. Now an interesting question arises - what shall happen if the amplitude or the pitch of the bell is changed; which means a new and different quality bell is used in the same experiment. Will the dog still salivate? Will the differences in responses to stimuli to stimulus occur here.

    The dog's brain is stimulated to the sound of that very bell. The brain is pretty good in distinguishing between different sounds of varying amplitude or pitch. So if the brain is trained artificially to induce a particular response to a stimulus, then it must not induce the same response if the stimulus is changed and there must be differences in responses to stimuli. Take for example a class in a school, the class rises to their feet without thinking if they see a person, dressed in a formal shirt and pants and wearing a tie, suddenly enter the classroom. But if they see another person, holding a broom, suddenly enter the classroom, they do not rise. This happens mainly because they are conditioned that they must rise if a well-dressed person enters the room, for he/she must be a teacher as he/she is well dressed. This induces a conditioned reflex and differences in responses to stimuli in them and they rise, without thinking. Now if the stimulus is changed, i.e. a peon enters the room, then the students' brain does not interpret the outfit and, therefore, does not induce the similar response.

This means the conditioned reflexes are only for a particular stimulus. If the stimulus is changed even a bit, the conditioned reflex will not be initiated thus.

 I conducted an experiment on a caged parrot. It goes as follows.

 A caged parrot is kept without food until it begins to show restlessness. Then Person A approaches the cage with food in his hand, opens the cage and keeps the food inside. During this process, the parrot shows great restlessness and begins to shout, which ceases when it gets the food. For two months, the process is repeated daily.
  After the span of two months, when the parrot is restless and requires food, Person A approaches the cage, but without any food this time. Now when the Person opens the cage, same restlessness and shouting is observed as it was when food was in his hand. It means a conditional reflex is introduced in the parrot, that when it is hungry and a person opens the cage(even though the person is without any food in his hand), it gets a stimulus that it is about to get its food, and the response produced is restlessness and shouting(in eagerness for the food).

  Now in similar conditions of hunger, a Person B approaches the cage, without any food in his hand. But this time, when Person B opens the cage, no response is produced.

Conclusion :

It might seem that the parrot's brain is trained to respond (shout and restlessness) when he sees a person with food opening its cage. But as in the experiment, it can be concluded that the parrot's brain is not just taking the food and the opening of the cage as stimulus; but it is also taking the person who opens the cage as a stimulus - therefore, it responded when Person A opened the cage and didn't respond when Person B opened the cage. Thus, it can be said - if a conditioned reflex and  is induced in any creature, then it might change a bit or be completely subdued even if the stimulus is similar to the one for which the brain of the creature is trained. Here arises the differences in responses to stimuli we were looking for.

Assumptions for the Hypothesis

• Dogs interpret the sounds as we do or think and the differences between amplitude, pitch and frequencies is large enough for their perception 
• Parrots can differentiate between two human faces and don't perceive both of them to be the same person!!!  :D

If you have any other experiment or thought or a suggestion for the improvement of the hypothesis, you can mail it to The Explorers.

Thanks in advance,

Nimish Mishra.