Every time Kasey, the dog, whines, her owners give her a doggie treat. As a result of her clueless owners, Kasey is a very whiney dog, illustrating the effects of stimulation conditioning.
This happens when a neutral stimulus (defined as any event which does not naturally provoke a response from the test subject) which, under classical conditioning, a subject learns to associate with an unconditioned stimulus.
The most used example is the experiment that Pavlov performed with his dog. The dogs in his experiment would salivate in response to food, but after repeatedly pairing the presentation of food with the sound of a bell, the dogs would begin to salivate to the sound alone. In this example, the sound of the bell was the conditioned stimulus.
