conditioned avoidance
- noun
- /kənˈdɪʃənd əˈvɔɪdəns/
- Specialized
:
evitación condicionada
- After several training sessions, the dog developed a conditioned avoidance to the sound of the vacuum cleaner, running away each time it was turned on.
Examples
-
Animals were trained to a criterion of eight conditioned avoidance responses over 10 consecutive trials.
Academic text (1993) -
Damage to the medial pathway had no effect on spontaneous alternation, exploration, or extinction of avoidance responses; however, the MPP subjects acquired the conditioned avoidance response more quickly than subjects in other conditions.
Academic text (1993) -
The child exhibited conditioned avoidance by flinching at the sight of the dentist's chair, having learned to associate it with painful experiences.
-
Through operant conditioning, the mouse displayed conditioned avoidance by refusing to enter the area where it had previously received electric shocks.
Synonyms
A learned action an animal or person does to avoid something bad after a warning signal
Surface Forms
Morphology
The noun phrase is compositionally built from 'conditioned' (learned through conditioning) + 'avoidance' (keeping away), so the meaning 'learned avoidance' is directly derivable from its parts. This follows a straightforward adjective+noun pattern common across languages and would be comprehensible to a B1 learner who knows both constituent words.
Etymology
Conditioned avoidance comes from simple lab studies where an animal heard a warning tone, learned to move away, and so avoided a shock. Here conditioned means 'learned' and avoidance means 'moving away', so the phrase describes a learned action to prevent something unpleasant.
