Updated on
October 2, 2026
Ivan Pavlov's Theory: Classical Conditioning Explained
Understand Pavlov's dog experiment, key terms and classroom examples. Use the comparison mini app and download a printable study note.
What is Ivan Pavlov's theory?
Ivan Pavlov's theory of learning explains how a neutral cue comes to trigger a reflex response after it is paired again and again with something that already causes that response. In his dog studies, a sound that often came before food began to bring salivation on its own. This is classical conditioning: learning that one event predicts another.
A test paper, a timer or a familiar room can bring a body response before a learner reads the first question. Looking at what comes before that response gives teachers a useful starting point: check the task, the cue and the learner's past experience.
Try this tomorrow
Year 3, maths, times-tables starter. Begin with three familiar questions and mark them in private. Keep the start cue clear so learners know what follows.
Look for: learners start the first question and can explain what the cue means.
Try this tomorrow
Year 11, English, mock exam practice. Open with a short, ungraded question in the usual room. Explain the timing and give feedback on the first step.
Look for: learners attempt the question and can say what they will do next.
Use the worked examples below to check your first impression. This guide covers the dog experiment, key terms, the bell question and Pavlov's place among the theories of learning. The comparison mini app helps you label your own example.
What Is Ivan Pavlov's Theory?
Start with the cue and the response you can observe. In Pavlov's laboratory, researchers could measure drops of saliva after a signal. In class, ask what a cue has come before and check what the learner says as well as what they do.
Key Takeaways
- Pavlov studied conditioned reflexes: a cue that had no effect at first began to cause a response after it predicted an event that mattered.
- Prediction matters: a cue gains meaning from what it signals. Repetition, timing and past learning all affect the result.
- Extinction is new learning: a response can decline when the signal no longer predicts the event, yet later return.
- Classroom claims need care: a bell, instruction or routine can involve rules, results and a planned act rather than classical conditioning.
The familiar example pairs a sound with food. Food already brings saliva in the test. Once the sound reliably comes before food, it can bring saliva on its own. The dog has learned a link between events.
The 1927 English text uses conditioned reflex. A recent translation uses conditional reflex as a closer match for the Russian term (Yokoyama, 2023). Modern texts still use conditioned stimulus and conditioned response.
Who Was Ivan Pavlov?
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was a Russian physiologist who lived from 1849 to 1936. He studied digestion, blood flow and nerves. His 1904 Nobel Prize recognised his work on digestion. His later fame in psychology grew from his research on conditioned reflexes.
What are Ivan Pavlov's most famous theories?
Pavlov is best known for learned reflexes, his research on digestion and his account of higher nervous activity, meaning how the brain responds to signals; classical conditioning is his best-known contribution to psychology. His work asks what happens in the body when a cue gains meaning.
Pavlov noticed that dogs sometimes salivated before food reached their mouths. Signals associated with feeding, such as the approach of an experimenter, could begin to elicit secretion. He turned this observation into a controlled programme for measuring how signals acquired and lost their effects.
So did Pavlov use a bell? The signal that appears most often in his 1927 lectures is a metronome, alongside buzzers, lights, touch, smells and a rotating object. An electric bell is mentioned too, described as buzzing (Pavlov, 1927). His biographer Daniel Todes argues that the ringing bell of popular memory is a myth, helped along by the Russian word zvonok, which can mean a bell or a buzzer (Todes, 2014). Jarius and Wildemann (2015) went back to the writings of Pavlov and his co-workers, a drawing of his laboratory and a 1926 film shot there. They argue that a bell was used at least occasionally, though other signals were used more often.
For an exam answer, the metronome is the safer example. The bell makes a fine shorthand, as long as you know it was one signal among many and not the heart of the research.
Pavlov's Dog Experiment, Step by Step
When did Pavlov do his dog experiment?
Pavlov studied dogs over many years and reported his work on conditioned reflexes in 1903; his English lectures appeared in 1927, so the familiar experiment refers to a research programme spanning years. The three stages below summarise that programme (Pavlov, 1927).
The test is clearest in three stages. The labels name each event's role in this specific test. A sound can play a different role in another test, depending on what the researcher measures.
| Stage | What happens | Terms |
|---|---|---|
| Before conditioning | Food elicits salivation. The experimental sound does not yet elicit the learned salivary response. | Food is the US; salivation to food is the UR; the sound is a neutral signal for this relation. |
| During conditioning | The sound reliably precedes food across trials. The sound gains information about what will happen next. | The signal and food form an informative CS-US relation. |
| After conditioning | The sound can elicit salivation before food appears. | The sound is now a CS; salivation to it is the CR. |
The number of pairings varies with the animal, response, cue, timing and setting. Past learning also matters. Treat any fixed figure, such as twenty pairings, as a claim about one test that needs a source.
Read the study note
The cue changes its role
Before learningNeutral stimulus (NS)The sound has yet to bring the measured salivary response.
After learningConditioned stimulus (CS)The same sound predicts food and can bring saliva before the food arrives.
Point to the sound in both halves. Its role changes through learning.
Study note: the signal, the food and salivation across three stages. Download the full-size note.
The Five Key Terms in Classical Conditioning
These five terms name the events and responses in the test. Unconditioned means the response occurs without the pairing being studied. Each label refers to the response the researcher is measuring.
- Neutral stimulus (NS): a cue that has yet to cause the measured response. In the dog example, the metronome starts in this role.
- Unconditioned stimulus (US): an event that causes the target response without the pairing. Food is the US.
- Unconditioned response (UR): the response caused by the US. Salivation to food is the UR.
- Conditioned stimulus (CS): a cue that causes a response after learning. The metronome becomes the CS.
- Conditioned response (CR): the response caused by the CS. Salivation to the metronome is the CR.
Does the conditioned response always match the unconditioned response?
The conditioned response can differ from the unconditioned response in strength or form because a cue prepares the animal for what follows, while the event itself brings its own response (Domjan, 2005). Salivation to food and salivation to a sound can differ. Treat the dog example as one pattern, rather than a rule for every learned response.
Acquisition, Extinction and Spontaneous Recovery
Acquisition is the growth of a response to a conditioned stimulus. It rests on the link between a cue and an outcome. A cue that comes before an outcome can give more useful information than one that occurs at random.
Extinction is the decline in a learned response when the conditioned stimulus keeps appearing without the unconditioned stimulus. If the metronome sounds but food no longer follows, saliva to the sound may fall. The dog learns a new link: the sound now comes without food.
Spontaneous recovery is the return of some learned responding after time has passed. Renewal is a return when the setting changes. These effects show how the first learning can persist after a response has faded (Bouton, 2002).
Diagram · Build It
How a learned response grows, fades and returns
The line shows how strongly the dog salivates to the metronome across a run of trials. Read it left to right: the four numbered moments match the four cards below.
1
Acquisition
The metronome keeps coming before food. The response to it grows fast, then levels off.
2
Extinction
The metronome sounds but food no longer follows. The response falls away.
3
Rest
Time passes with no trials at all, shown by the shaded gap.
4
Spontaneous recovery
The first tick after the rest brings part of the response back. It fades again, faster than before.
A teaching sketch of the usual pattern, not data from one study. The same return can happen when the setting changes (renewal), which is why extinction is treated as new learning rather than forgetting (Bouton, 2002).
Read the diagram as a warning for any change of routine. A response that seems to have gone can come back after a holiday, a new room or a supply teacher, because the old link was never erased.
A change in a classroom routine has several possible causes. Learners may have misunderstood the task, lost focus, responded to different results or decided that a rule has changed. Check these explanations alongside the cue and response.
Generalisation and Discrimination
Stimulus generalisation occurs when cues like the conditioned stimulus also cause a response. A dog trained with one tone may respond to tones that sound like it. The response tends to fade as the new tone becomes less like the trained cue.
Discrimination grows when signals have different links to the outcome. If one tone predicts food and another comes without food, the dog may respond more to the first tone. It learns which differences matter.
Teachers can use these terms as one way to read an emotional response. A learner who feels tense in several test rooms may react to shared cues. Yet the teacher must also check the language, task, sensory needs, adult relationships and past results.
Timing and Higher-Order Conditioning
Order and timing decide whether a signal is learned at all. Learning is usually strongest when the signal starts a few seconds before the event. Pavlov's team showed how much order matters: an electric bell sounded after food failed to become a signal even after 374 pairings, while a rotating object shown before food worked after five (Pavlov, 1927).
Taste is the famous exception to the short gap. People and animals can link a flavour with sickness that arrives hours later, and a single bad experience can be enough. This is why one bout of food poisoning can put someone off a dish for years.
Pavlov also showed that a learned signal can pass its effect on. Once a dog salivated to the metronome, a black square was shown for ten seconds and, after a 15-second gap, the metronome sounded, with no food at all. The square began to produce saliva of its own, which Pavlov called a secondary conditioned reflex (Pavlov, 1927). Today it is called second-order or higher-order conditioning.
Higher-order conditioning is one way feelings travel along a chain of cues. A learner who dreads a test may come to feel uneasy at the revision timetable that announces it, although the timetable has never come before anything unpleasant. Treat this as a possibility to check, not a diagnosis.
Why Prediction Matters More Than Repetition Alone
Simple accounts say that learning occurs because two events keep appearing together. Later tests showed that this is not enough. A cue is useful when it changes the chance of an outcome or tells the animal more than other cues do.
Rescorla (1968) compared the probability of shock when a signal was present with the probability when it was absent. Little conditioning occurred when the signal gave no extra information, even though the signal and shock sometimes occurred together. This established the importance of contingency.
The Rescorla-Wagner model says learning changes when the result differs from what the cues predict (Rescorla and Wagner, 1972). This later model helps explain blocking. A cue that already predicts the result can limit learning about a new cue beside it.
These ideas help us ask what a signal adds. Timing and past learning also matter. Reviews set out both the model's strengths and its gaps (Miller, Barnet and Grahame, 1995). Researchers also debate how far contingency explains learning (Papini and Bitterman, 1990).
For teachers, the safe lesson is not that “consistency conditions learners”. It is that recurring cues can acquire meaning from what they predict. Whether an observed classroom response is Pavlovian remains an inference that needs other explanations to be checked.
Classical Conditioning Examples in Humans
In people, Pavlovian learning can shape body and emotional responses. A smell may cause nausea after an illness. A clinic may cause a stress response after painful care. A neutral image paired with pleasant or unpleasant material may gain some of that emotional value.
Taste-aversion research shows that some relations are learned more readily than others. Garcia and Koelling (1966) found that rats associated taste with later illness more readily than with shock, while audiovisual cues showed a different pattern. This challenged the idea that every cue and consequence can be linked equally easily.
Watson and Rayner's 1920 report about “Albert B.” is often used as a human example. It was a single, methodologically limited case, and later textbook versions exaggerated what it established (Harris, 1979). The procedure would not meet modern ethical standards. The detailed study belongs in the John B. Watson guide.
Conditioning may play a part in anxiety, but one learned link cannot explain it all. Thoughts, doubt, social judgement, past results, health and context also matter. Ongoing panic, trauma signs or attendance difficulty need the school's safety, SEND and mental-health routes. A trained clinician may also need to help.
How is Pavlov's theory used today?
Pavlov's ideas help explain how cues gain meaning in advertising, food preferences and health research: a familiar sound, image or smell can bring a response through its link with earlier events. These are possible examples to analyse:
- Advertising and marketing: a brand image paired with pleasant scenes may gain some of their emotional value.
- Food: the smell of a dish may bring nausea after it was linked with illness.
- Health research: researchers study how places and sounds linked with painful care come to bring a stress response.
What is the Pavlovian theory of child development?
Pavlovian learning helps explain how babies and young children learn links between cues and events, such as a familiar food smell bringing saliva; it describes one learning process within wider child development. Children also learn through talk, play and watching other people.
For a simple childhood example, imagine a child who often smells a familiar meal before eating. The smell can come to bring saliva before the food arrives. The smell is the learned cue; saliva to it is the learned response.
What Can Teachers Infer from Pavlov?
Pavlov gives teachers one way to ask how a cue may gain emotional or bodily meaning. A room, sheet, sound, adult voice or test format can become linked with what often follows it. This is one possible account, not a diagnosis.
Consider a learner who becomes visibly tense when a particular test booklet appears. The booklet may have acquired a negative association through repeated stressful experiences. The teacher should also check the reading load, time pressure, prior attainment, sensory conditions, public comparison and clarity of the task.
Safe practice includes saying what will happen, correcting in private and making the task easy to access. It also gives the learner a fair chance of success. A teacher can say, “Read the first question for two minutes. I will check the wording with you before the timer starts.” This cuts doubt without a claim to provide therapy.
A learner packing away when a bell rings is not, by itself, proof of classical conditioning. The act may follow an instruction, a school rule or past results. Attention signals, routines, rewards and sanctions belong mainly to classroom practice and operant conditioning.
Teachers should not use scents as a conditioning tool. Allergies, asthma, sensory needs and personal links make this unsafe. They should also not provide exposure therapy, systematic desensitisation or trauma treatment.
Why might a subject bring an uneasy feeling?
A subject, room or teacher's voice may gain an uneasy association when it often comes before a stressful lesson, but the learner's task knowledge and their account of events also matter. The examples below show how to check both.
Classical Conditioning in Class: Two Worked Examples
Both examples follow the same three steps. Name the cue and what it has usually come before. Rule out other explanations. Then change what the cue predicts, so it comes to signal something a learner can manage. None of this is therapy; it is ordinary teaching done with the cue in mind.
Worked example: Year 3 maths, the times-tables timer
In a Year 3 class, a daily times-tables check starts with a loud beep from the class timer and ends with scores read out. After a few weeks, Amara's shoulders rise and she stops writing as soon as the timer beeps, even on days when the questions are easy. The beep has often come before a public score she dreads, so the beep alone may now bring the stress.
First, rule out the plain reasons. Can she read the questions, does she know the facts, and has anything changed at home or with friends? If those check out, change what the beep predicts. Open with three questions she can almost certainly answer, mark in private, and let the same beep also start paired games where nobody is scored. Over the next three weeks, watch whether she starts writing straight after the beep.
Worked example: Year 11, the mock exam hall
Jay, in Year 11, has sat three mocks in the sports hall, each timed and each hard, and did badly in two. Now Jay's chest tightens on the way into the hall, even for PE. The hall has come before tests that felt overwhelming, so it may carry that feeling on its own. Other explanations matter just as much: gaps in revision, sleep, pressure at home and what Jay says to themselves about failing.
The lever is what the hall predicts before the summer. One practical option is short practice quizzes in the hall, set out as it will be, where most learners do well and nothing counts. Say what each session is for, keep the first question gentle and give feedback on how to improve rather than a rank. This kind of low-stakes retrieval practice reduced test anxiety to a medium extent across 24 studies (Yang et al., 2023), although one large study found no change either way (Yang et al., 2020).
Be clear about what that evidence does not show. None of these studies measured classical conditioning; they measured how anxious learners said they felt after practice tests. So the Pavlovian account is a useful lens, not a proven mechanism. If a learner's panic is intense, lasting or stops them coming to school, use the school's pastoral and SEND routes rather than a classroom fix.
Teachers online describe plenty of routines built on cues. The table sets three of their posts beside what the research says about each one.
Teachers on social media · Cues and routines · September 2026
What it looks like in the room
Three routines teachers described on social media this term. The routine and notice columns are our summary of each post; the evidence column is Pavlov's research and later studies, not the post.
| Routine, as teachers describe it | What you would notice | What the evidence says |
|---|---|---|
| A learner asks for the toilet every time phonics or reading starts | ||
she asks to go to the restroom multiple times faithfully every time i teach phonics or reading. sometimes it is avoidance behavior |
The request arrives at the same cue each day: the start of the lesson she finds hardest. The teacher reads some of it as avoidance. | Leaving is operant: escape from a hard task makes the request more likely. The start of reading can also become a Pavlovian cue for dread, because it has reliably come before failure. Rule out the reading gap first. |
| The Do Now, drilled until it runs on instinct | ||
The hardest part of the year was drilling the Do Now routine until it became instinct. |
In a class of 38, the opening task was one homework question, checked as learners finished. The routine was taught until nobody had to think about starting. | A routine learners follow is mainly instruction and operant practice. What Pavlov adds is the feeling the start signal carries: a cue that always leads to a task learners can do tends to predict success rather than stress (Rescorla, 1968). |
| A visual timer and task board so learners see what comes next | ||
helping them see what’s next, stay on task, and transition with less frustration. |
The teacher wants the end of each task visible for autistic learners and learners with ADHD, so transitions cause less frustration. | A timer is a signal that predicts the end of a task, which is the kind of relation Pavlov and Rescorla studied. The evidence here is about prediction, not about any one tool, so watch how each learner responds. |
Teachers also argued this month about whether test anxiety is real. Some say it is only missing knowledge; others describe a blank and a racing body even when the work is known. Pavlov's account fits the second group, and the worked examples above ask a teacher to check the first explanation before reaching for it.
In their own words · September 2026
Is test anxiety real?
Four short posts from an argument on social media this month. A tutor and a teacher say the dread goes once the knowledge is secure; a teacher and a former learner say it is real even when the work is known.
- objection
"Test anxiety" is largely not a thing. It's the natural panic that sets in when you're aware you're not proficient at the subject matter.
If they know how to learn, how learning happens, and know how to get to know things then anxiety disappears.
It is "I knew all this and when I saw the paper I drew a blank." It is sweating hands, rapid breathing, difficulty concentrating.
Mathematics was where the anxiety was most crippling, and my test scores never reflected my proficiency
None of these posts is evidence about what causes test anxiety. Read them as questions to test in your own room.
Starter observation scale: choose the next teaching move
Use this observation scale during an ordinary starter. Record what happens before you explain why it happened. The same sign can have several causes.
| What you notice | What to check | Next teaching move |
|---|---|---|
| Starts the first question | Can the learner explain the task? | Keep the cue and instructions clear. |
| Pauses, then starts | Which word or step needs explaining? | Clarify that step and check the first answer. |
| Has yet to start | Can the learner read and attempt the question? | Model the first step and check in privately. |
Classical vs Operant Conditioning
Classical conditioning concerns a cue that predicts an event and brings a response. Operant conditioning concerns an act and the results that follow it. Ask which link is being learned in the example.
| Question | Classical conditioning | Operant conditioning |
|---|---|---|
| What relation is learned? | One event predicts another. | A behaviour has particular consequences. |
| What is measured? | Responding elicited by a predictive cue. | How often, how strongly or in what setting behaviour occurs. |
| Pavlov example | A metronome predicts food and elicits salivation. | Not the focus of Pavlov's dog preparation. |
| Classroom boundary | A cue may acquire emotional or physiological significance. | Praise, rewards or sanctions may change voluntary behaviour through their consequences. |
For reinforcement, punishment, schedules and voluntary classroom behaviour, use the operant conditioning guide. Operant ideas grew from Edward Thorndike's puzzle-box studies and his law of effect. For the wider history and assumptions of the school of thought, use the behaviourism theory guide. Test the difference on the examples below.
Mini app · Build It
Classical or operant?
Choose an example and decide which kind of learning it shows, then see each part labelled. It works as a revision starter for psychology classes or a quick check in staff training. Pick the last option to label an example of your own and print it as a card.
A thinking aid built on Pavlov's terms, not a diagnosis. If a learner's distress is strong or lasting, follow your school's pastoral and SEND routes.
The quickest test is to ask what the learner controls. If the response happens to them when a cue appears, think Pavlov. If they do something and what follows changes how often they do it, think operant conditioning.
How Pavlov Influenced Watson and Behaviourism
Who came first, Pavlov or Watson?
Pavlov came first: he reported his work on learned reflexes in 1903, ten years before Watson set out behaviourism in 1913 and seventeen years before the 1920 Little Albert study. Watson used Pavlov's way of testing cues to study how people learn.
Watson's 1913 paper called for a science based on what people do. He later drew on work on conditioned reflexes (Watson, 1913, 1916). Pavlov's tests gave him a way to study how a cue brings a response.
Where does Pavlov fit in behaviourism?
Pavlov's work helped shape behaviourism by showing how cues can bring learned responses; he studied the body, while Watson made what people do the focus of psychology. Skinner then studied how the results of an act affect what happens next. This is operant learning.
Their ideas answer different questions. Use the behaviourism overview to compare how each account explains learning.
Strengths, Limitations and Ethical Questions
What are biological preparedness and instinctive drift?
Biological preparedness means animals learn some links more easily than others; instinctive drift means an animal returns to a natural pattern of action that competes with what it was trained to do. Both show how the kind of animal shapes what it learns. Drift is usually studied in operant conditioning.
Taste aversion gives a Pavlovian example: a flavour can become linked with later illness (Garcia and Koelling, 1966). Drift concerns the animal's trained actions. Keep these ideas distinct when you compare classical and operant learning.
What can animal experiments tell teachers?
Pavlov built clear tests of how a cue gains control over a response. Later work on contingency, extinction and related effects made the account more exact. It did not make Pavlov's work pointless.
The main evidence came from controlled tests with animals. This helps researchers isolate a learning process, but it limits direct claims about class. People also use language, goals, thought and social ties. They learn within school rules and culture.
Classical conditioning is not a complete theory of education. It does not explain how learners understand a proof, organise historical evidence or monitor a complex strategy. Those tasks need broader accounts, such as cognitivist theories of learning and Bandura's social learning theory. Our overview of the main learning theories sets Pavlov beside them.
Animal research and the Little Albert report also raise ethical concerns. Rules on consent, welfare, harm and withdrawal have changed greatly. Teachers should explain old studies with care. They must not present distress as a method to copy.
Brain research links threat learning to a wide network. It includes the amygdala, hippocampus and parts of the cortex. No single brain area simply stores fear. An animal response also cannot explain the whole of a learner's conscious anxiety (LeDoux and Pine, 2016).
Keep the evidence boundary clear
Observe the cue, check the task and listen to the learner. A change in how quickly someone starts work gives you useful information. Explaining its cause needs more than one observation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it possible to Pavlov yourself?
Your own responses can become linked with cues through experience, such as a familiar food smell bringing saliva before a meal; deliberate habits also involve choices and consequences, which belong to broader accounts of learning. A study playlist may signal work, but starting work also depends on your plan and what follows.
What does it mean to Pavlov someone?
To “Pavlov someone” means to link a cue with a response through past experience, but people often use this slang loosely for a habit, rather than the process studied in Pavlov's lab. Ask what cue they mean and what follows it. Use the table above to tell a response to a cue from an act shaped by its results.
Is there a Pavlov theory PDF or PowerPoint?
The download mini app offers a one-page Pavlov study-note PDF; the classical and operant mini app lets you label an example and print its card for revision or discussion. There is no PowerPoint download on this page.
What is Pavlov's theory in simple terms?
In simple terms, Pavlov showed how a sound can make a dog expect food. At first, food brings saliva. After the sound has often come before food, the sound alone can bring saliva.
Did Pavlov use a bell?
Rarely, if ever, in the way the story tells it. The metronome is the signal his lectures name most. Historians still argue about how often a bell was used, so the metronome is the safer example to give.
What are US, UR, CS and CR?
Food is the unconditioned stimulus (US). Saliva to food is the unconditioned response (UR). The sound becomes the conditioned stimulus (CS). Saliva to the sound is the conditioned response (CR). The labels tell you what brings the response: food itself or a sound that has come to predict it.
Is a classroom bell an example of classical conditioning?
A classroom bell can signal a rule, an expected result or an instruction to follow. It may also gain links with feelings or body responses. To identify Pavlovian learning, look at what the sound has predicted and which response it brings.
How is Pavlov different from Skinner?
Pavlov asked what a cue makes an animal expect. Skinner asked how the results of an act change what the animal does next. A sound that brings saliva fits Pavlov's account. Giving merits for homework fits Skinner's study of operant learning.
Does extinction erase conditioning?
No. The response may fade when the CS no longer predicts the US. It can later return through spontaneous recovery or renewal. Extinction is best seen as new learning that depends on the setting.
What is higher-order conditioning?
It is learning one step removed from the original event. A cue that already works, such as the metronome, is paired with a new cue, and the new cue starts to work too, even though it never came before food.
Does classical conditioning work on humans?
Yes. Taste aversions, a racing heart at a dentist's drill and nerves at a particular room are common human examples. People also think, talk and choose, so a learned link is rarely the whole explanation.
How can teachers use classical conditioning?
Mainly by noticing it. Look for cues that seem to trigger dread, rule out simpler reasons, then make those cues come before something a learner can manage, such as easy practice questions marked in private. Avoid anything that works by making learners anxious.
References
These sources support the history, key terms, later updates, human examples and limits in this guide.
Further Reading: Key Sources on Pavlovian Conditioning
- Miller, R. R., Barnet, R. C. and Grahame, N. J. (1995). Assessment of the Rescorla-Wagner model. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 363 to 386.
- Papini, M. R. and Bitterman, M. E. (1990). The role of contingency in classical conditioning. Psychological Review, 97(3), 396 to 403.
- Bouton, M. E. (2002). Context, Ambiguity, and Unlearning: Sources of Relapse after Behavioral Extinction.
- Domjan, M. (2005). Pavlovian Conditioning: A Functional Perspective.
- Eelen, P. (2018). Classical Conditioning: Classical Yet Modern.
- Fanselow, M. S. and Poulos, A. M. (2005). The Neuroscience of Mammalian Associative Learning.
- Garcia, J. and Koelling, R. A. (1966). Relation of Cue to Consequence in Avoidance Learning.
- Harris, B. (1979). Whatever Happened to Little Albert?.
- Jarius, S. and Wildemann, B. (2015). And Pavlov Still Rings a Bell: Summarising the Evidence for the Use of a Bell in Pavlov's Iconic Experiments on Classical Conditioning. Journal of Neurology, 262, 2177 to 2178.
- LeDoux, J. E. and Pine, D. S. (2016). Using Neuroscience to Help Understand Fear and Anxiety: A Two-System Framework.
- Pavlov, I. P. (1927). Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex.
- Rescorla, R. A. (1968). Probability of Shock in the Presence and Absence of CS in Fear Conditioning.
- Rescorla, R. A. and Wagner, A. R. (1972). A Theory of Pavlovian Conditioning: Variations in the Effectiveness of Reinforcement and Nonreinforcement. In A. H. Black and W. F. Prokasy (Eds.), Classical Conditioning II, pp. 64 to 99.
- Rescorla, R. A. (1988). Pavlovian Conditioning: It's Not What You Think It Is.
- Todes, D. P. (2014). Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199925193.
- Watson, J. B. (1913). Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It.
- Watson, J. B. (1916). The Place of the Conditioned-Reflex in Psychology.
- Watson, J. B. and Rayner, R. (1920). Conditioned Emotional Reactions.
- Yang, C., Sun, B., Potts, R., Yu, R., Luo, L. and Shanks, D. R. (2020). Do Working Memory Capacity and Test Anxiety Modulate the Beneficial Effects of Testing on New Learning? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 26(4), 724 to 738.
- Yang, C., Li, J., Zhao, W., Luo, L. and Shanks, D. R. (2023). Do Practice Tests (Quizzes) Reduce or Provoke Test Anxiety? A Meta-Analytic Review. Educational Psychology Review, 35, 87.
- Yokoyama, O. T. (2023). Pavlov on the Conditional Reflex: Papers, 1903 to 1936. Oxford University Press.
