International Journal of Comparative Psychology

Is Pavlovian conditioning the same thing as Pavlovian conditioning? Though that question seems tautological, this article shows that it is not, because Pavlovian conditioning has at least three different meanings: Pavlovian conditioning is (1) a procedure, (2) the learning phenomenon observed in that same procedure and (3) the learning process explaining the phenomenon observed in that procedure. If we look at this third meaning from an evolutionary point of view, it seems extremely unlikely that a single Pavlovian conditioning process is responsible for learning in all procedures classified as Pavlovian conditioning -- a conclusion that supported by behavioral and neural data. In the end, it seems that it might be better to drop the term Pavlovian conditioning to designate a learning process and to stop the quest for a single process explaining all Pavlovian learning. Instead, it would be more fruitful to understand under which condition a particular model of Pavlovian learning holds. The same conclusion applies to other research field in the psychology of learning, notably operant conditioning and statistical learning.