Woodruff-Pak, D. S. (1999). New directions for a classical paradigm: Human eyeblink conditioning. Psychological Science, 10, 1-3.

III. Overview:

This paper serves as the introduction for a special section of Psychological Science devoted to recent advances in the conditioning of the human eyeblink. The special section contains 5 articles in addition to Woodruff-Pak's. The 4 articles following Woodruff-Pak's are each empirical studies of the human eyeblink. The first examined the eyeblink response in infants and establishes the utility of the procedure for studying the ontogeny of the response. The second article examined the eyeblink response in an obsessive-compulsive population in an effort to test the notion that associative learning is accelerated in this population. The third article examined the eyeblink response relative to the role of declarative and nondeclarative memory in classical conditioning.

The fourth article explored the role of the cerebellum in the interval timing involved in classical conditioning of the human eyeblink. The final article of the special section highlights the factors responsible for the renewed interest of late in the conditioning of the human eyeblink. The author Joseph Steinmetz, argued that among other things, conditioning of the human eyeblink can be used to study both basic biological and psychological processes and to determine the nature of certain brain and nervous system pathologies.

IV. General Method:

The basic procedure used in conditioning of the human eyeblink is to follow the presentation of the conditioned stimulus (CS) with a reflex-eliciting stimulus (the unconditioned stimulus (UCS)), such as a puff of air to the cornea. With repeated CS-UCS pairings, the person eventually blinks in the presence of the CS (the conditioned response).

V. Conclusions and Implications:

The researchers contributing to this special section all argued that the value of studying the conditioning of the human eyeblink is more important for what it tells us about underlying physiological and cognitive processes rather than what it tells us about the eyeblink response itself. That is, much like schedules of reinforcement, the utility of this procedure rests on what it can tell us about the underlying causes of behavior.