01/11/2026
Classical conditioning is very easy to understand. It simply involves anticipation, where an animal experiences and remembers stimuli that predict primary reinforcers or other learned responses.
You may have already experienced this with horses (or any other animal). For example, you have a bucket in your hand and your horse eagerly anticipates food.
This is classical conditioning. Your horse has learned to associate the human holding the bucket with being fed.
Classical conditioning explains how horses learn to respond to the many subtle behaviours of other horses, to other environmental events and to the rider’s or handler’s light aids, human postural cues, seat and voice cues.
Classical conditioning evolved in animals to provide them with clues and hints about things that matter to them.
Classical conditioning is also often referred to as Pavlovian conditioning. Ivan Pavlov showed that a dog could learn to salivate if a bell was rung just before it was provided with food.
He was actually doing physiological experiments on dog salivation when he accidentally discovered that the dog, in anticipation of the food, would begin salivating as soon as he opened the laboratory door.
He realised that he was onto a previously undescribed learning phenomenon.
In earlier times in psychology, the term classical conditioning was reserved solely to describe the origin of a conditioned stimulus that triggers an unconditioned response (a natural one) such as salivation.
It was not a term used to describe the uptake of a cue for a learned behaviour.
In early days of psychology, a cue that triggered a response by negative reinforcement was known as a discriminative stimulus.
However nowadays it is recognised that whether the cue triggers an unconditioned response or an already conditioned response, the same brain parts are activated in the acquisition of that cue.
An excerpt from Andrew McLean’s Modern Horse Training: Equitation Science Principles & Practice, Volume 2.
