Naturalistic observation

Is a research tool in which a subject is observed in its natural habitat without any manipulation by the observer. The scientist may observe animals (humans are rational animals) in their natural habitat, common life. They observe mating, living conditions, and many other qualities of animals. They can be overt (the participants are aware they are being observed) or covert (the participants do not know they are being observed). Sometimes the participants are aware they are being observed and act different than unusual. The covert one is better because don’t affect the participant.

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The advantages by merely observing a given instance without any manipulation in its natural context it makes the behaviors exhibited more credible because they are occurring in a real typical scenario as opposed to an artificial one generated within a lab. It allows researchers to study things that cannot be manipulated in a lab due to ethical concerns.

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The disadvantages of naturalistic observation include the fact that it can be difficult to determine the exact cause of a behavior and the experimenter cannot control for outside variables. People may behavior differently when they know they are being watched. People may try to behave in a certain way in order to conform to what they think the research expects to see. Different observers may draw different conclusions from the same witnessed behavior.

Methods:

• Tally counts: The observer writes down when and how many times certain behaviors occurred.
• Observer narratives: The observer may take notes during the session and then go back later to try to collect data and discern behavior patterns from these notes.
• Audio or video recordings: Depending upon the type of behavior being observed, the researchers might also decide to make actual audio or video-taped recordings of each observation session.
• Time sampling: Involves taking samples as different intervals of time, which may be random or systematic.
• Situation sampling: Involves observing a behavior in a variety of different situations and settings.

Examples:

Some famous examples of naturalistic observations include Charles Darwin's journey aboard the HMS Beagle, which served as the basis for his theory of natural selection, and Jane Goodall's work studying the behavior of chimpanzees.

Animal Studies:

Animal experiments aid in investigating many aspects of human psychology, including perception, emotion, learning, memory, and thought. Animal learning experiments aid in investigating the biological basis of teaching, memory and behavior. Non-human primates, cats, dogs, rats and other rodents are used. Controlled experiments introduce only one independent variable at a time, in order to ascertain its unique effects upon dependent variables. They are most of the times in Laboratory settings.

Classical conditioning:

Is a form of learning in which one stimulus comes to signal the occurrence of a second stimulus. Pavlov presented dogs with a ringing bell followed by food. The food elicited salivation, and after repeated bell-food pairings the bell also caused the dogs to salivate. It could be with positive stimulus like food or negative stimulus like electricity. But, the best one is the positive stimulus that makes that animals associate the good stimulus to another one faster, and don´t hurt the animal.

An Application in human of the discover of classical conditioning is when we study we need a good stimulus like good attitude or eat a candy another stimulus like after study bathing with cold water to can memories better the information. Or a experiment that I do, all the night I readied in the bed in some position and after I read go directly to sleep, now including in the day when I read in the that position I get sleepy.

Example:  In the 1890s, Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov famously used dogs to demonstrate classical conditioning.

Pavlov presented dogs with a ringing bell followed by food. The food elicited salivation, and after repeated bell-food pairings the bell also caused the dogs to salivate.