classical conditioning

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun A learning process by which a subject comes to respond in a specific way to a previously neutral stimulus after the subject repeatedly encounters the neutral stimulus together with another stimulus that already elicits the response.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun psychology The use of a neutral stimulus, originally paired with one that invokes a response, to generate a conditioned response

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun conditioning that pairs a neutral stimulus with a stimulus that evokes a reflex; the stimulus that evokes the reflex is given whether or not the conditioned response occurs until eventually the neutral stimulus comes to evoke the reflex