How do biological constraints affect classical and operant conditioning?
An animal's capacity for conditioning is limited by biological constraints, so some associations are easier to learn. Each species learns behaviors that aid its survival—a phenomenon called preparedness. Those who readily learned taste aversions were unlikely to eat the same toxic food again and were more likely to survive and leave descendants. Nature constrains each species' capacity for both classical conditioning and operant conditioning. Our preparedness to associate a CS with a US that follows predictably and immediately is often (but not always) adaptive. During operant training, animals may display instinctive drift by reverting to biologically predisposed patterns.