Learning about Learning - Chapter 6

One thing that I never put into perspective is where we draw all our knowledge from. Observing, trial-and-error, etc. What's cool is all those things we thought we knew about learning all have neat, little labels. So lets get crackin, Chapter 6, Geronimo!

Now everyone has seen this episode of The Office
http://www.spike.com/video-clips/0jnov0/the-office-the-jim-trains-dwight
and now that you have, you'll probably remember Jim saying something about a certain scientist who taught dogs to salvate. AHA! That scientist was reknowned, Russian physicist, Ivan Pavlov. He noticed that dogs responded to food by slobbering profusely over the sight of food. He soon noticed that the dogs also reacted similarily to his footsteps before dinner. He saw that the dog slobbering at the sight of food was an unconditioned response (meaning an involuntary action, something the dog innately did) and that the food was the unconditioned stimulus, because the natural response to delectable morsles is to slobber over them. Pavlov recognized that his footsteps set off an alarm for the dog so he designed an experiment to test his theory of this "alarm". Pavlov had his pooch strapped into a harness, and set a dish of dog food behind a blind. He then would set off a metronome before feeding the dog, and eventually, just like in the video, the dog began to salvate at the sound of the metronome. It knew food was on the way. The metronome represented a conditioned stimulus, meaning it was learned, aquired, to drool in response to the ticking noise.
Likewise, Dwight Shrute was conditioned to the computer sound, but he expected a treat to be presented and it wasn't offered. What a fool! Actually, that type of experimentation, withholding the altoid or doggy dish is called extinction, because it is the removal of the conditioned stimulus causing the response. The Dwight would soon learn that the computer noise would not always follow an altoid. However, should the altoid ever be rewarded again after the noise, a spontaneous recovery would be established and Dwight would pick up his old habit again. This is called Classical Conditioning, should Dwight or the dog hear a similar noise, but not the exact same one, they may respond in one of two ways.
Stimulus gerneralization is when the stimuli is close but no cigar, regardless the same response will be made as if it was made by the original stimuli. Stimulus discrimination would be the ignorance of a similar stimuli, or a less pronounced response as it says in the book. If there's one important thing outta Chapter 6, this is it!