 Dear students, in this topic we shall discuss about associative learning. Associative learning is a type of learning behavior that involves making associations between experiences and keeping them in memory. For example, a mouse bites a brightly colored caterpillar that tastes bad. The mouse will keep this in his mind and will avoid attacking any other insects which have similar appearance or similar color in future. This ability to associate one environmental feature, for example the color, with an other such as the foul taste or bad smell is known as associative learning. The classical conditioning and the second is called operant conditioning. Classical conditioning is an arbitrary stimulus that becomes associated with a particular outcome. Classical conditioning is an arbitrary stimulus associated with a particular outcome. For example, a Russian scientist, Ivan Pavlov, experimented on classical conditioning that became classical in behavioral physiology. You know that dogs start salivating when they see food in front of them. Pavlov said that when a dog had to present food, he would first play the bell. The dog began to understand that when the bell rings, my food comes. This association developed. After a while Pavlov experienced that when the bell rings, the dog starts salivating the food. That is a classical conditioning. In operant conditioning, an animal learns to associate one of its own behaviors with a reward or punishment and then tends to repeat or avoid that behavior. This behavior is usually called trial or error learning. For example, a predator avoids all the prey which are associated with painful experience. Similarly, an animal can repeat such an experiment again and again as a result of which suddenly a food was found from the surprise. A classical experiment was done on rats in which a rat was trained to press a lever at the end passing through a difficult path and get food from it. The rat adopted this habit for the future. That was an example of operant conditioning.