So from what ive understood, a conditioned response is a mixture of a neutral stimuli (whistle) with an unconditional stimuli (smell of food).
Now I have a game that is called EU4. Every month you get income, and when you do theres a ticking sound of cash to let you know youve earned money. Now i feel pleasure when i feel this ticking sound. Is that a conditioned response? There is not unconditional stimuli in this situation.
Or is the dopamine injected to me when i accomplish something (get that monthly income) is an unconditional stimuli and THATS why that “ka ching” sound makes me feel good?
Yes, it’s an example of second-order conditioning. Either the sense of accomplishment or the money has become associated with pleasure through your previous experiences.
Or more likely a much higher-order. First and second order conditioning are much more studied, since it’s easier to conduct controlled experiments with simple systems, but everyday life is much more complex.
This is one of those topics I find facinating and keep hoping that we have some experts on board here who are willing to enter a thread and explain things in layman terms. Everyhting I have been able to research on the topic is usually relating to controlled studies on a very limited number or responses. I always walk away with the feeling that the number of possible combinations of responses is most likley to large to actually categorize. The thing I find ironic is that in everyday life we have many amoung us with no formal knowledge of nuero science who have developed considerable expertise at manipulating the responses of others and even adjusting their responses to various stimuli. I feel like it is probably the most important science that has yet to be usefully employed into society.
Little work is done on classical conditioning these days because it proved to be largely a dead end in the quest to understand real world behavior. It wsa superseded by research on operant conditioning, which also turned out to be dead and end, and was then mostly superseded, some 50 years ago, by cognitive psychology* in its various forms. That family of research programs is ongoing and still quite fruitful. (It is not that classical and operant conditioning do not exist, just that they do not, ultimately, take us very far towards understanding behavior or the mind, even of animals, let alone people.)
Incidentally, Standarduser seems to under the impression that the feeling of pleasure is a direct result of the release of dopamine in the brain. That is (at best) a HUGE oversimplification. Dopamine is involved in many brain process that have nothing in particular to do with pleasure, and pleasure almost certainly involves neurotransmitters other than dopamine. If we want to understand the neuroscience of effects such as pleasure, it is probably more relevant to understand which areas of the brain (or even which particular neurons) are stimulated or inhibited, rather than to know the particular neurochemicals involved.
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*Having glanced at it, that Wikipedia article on cognitive psychology really does not look very good. It does not give due attention to many important aspects of the approach (notably the importance of computational theory and computational modelling in the field), contains many dubious or misleading claims, and generally seems biased and one sided to me. However, finding something better on the open web would probably be a long and thankless task that I am not currently inclined to undertake.
In trying to understand the subltle nuances of how our brain reacts to things I find myself sometimes making note of my own feeling and obvious changes I see in others as the enviroment around myself or them changes. An example might be I walk from a neat living area into a cluttered office area of my house, or a busy work area in my shop, or I might step into the garden and relax while observing the local birds at play. I can feel subtle changes sweeping over me anytime something around me changes. While on a computer the changes may be many times more rapid than they would be in a normal living situation because I am going from one subject or group to another where I am perceived differently or perceive others differently.
I firmly believe that a practical working knowledge of these changes is well within the grasp of thos able and willing to dedicate themselves to it. I am not so sure it is something that could be easily taught from a book.