You searched for: “preconditioning
precondition (verb), preconditions; preconditioned; preconditioning
1. To subject a person or something, to a special treatment in preparation for a subsequent experience, process, test, etc.: "Henry had to precondition the surface of the table before starting the final painting."
2. Etymology: apparently from Latin precondicere, "to talk over together before, to agree with in advance"; from pre-, "before" + con-, "with, together" + dicere, "to say".
preconditioning (s) (noun) (no plural)
The creation of a situation in which a stimulus that is applied before will produce a certain response later: In her amateur psychological experiments with birds, Sadie planned a sequence of preconditioning which encouraged the birds to react positively to food that was presented to them.
This entry is located in the following units: dic-, dict- (page 7) pre-, prae- (page 5)