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Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Pavlov's dog experiments played a critical role in the discovery of one of the most important concepts in psychology: Classical conditioning. While it happened quite by accident, Pavlov's famous experiments had a major impact on our understanding of how learning takes place as well as the development of the school of behavioral psychology.
Classical conditioning is sometimes called Pavlovian conditioning. How did experiments on the digestive response in dogs lead to one of the most important discoveries in psychology?
Ivan Pavlov was a noted Russian physiologist who won the Nobel Prize for his work studying digestive processes. While studying digestion in dogs, Pavlov noted an interesting occurrence: His canine subjects would begin to salivate whenever an assistant entered the room. The concept of classical conditioning is studied by every entry-level psychology student, so it may be surprising to learn that the man who first noted this phenomenon was not a psychologist at all.
In his digestive research, Pavlov and his assistants would introduce a variety of edible and non-edible items and measure the saliva production that the items produced. Salivation, he noted, is a reflexive process. It occurs automatically in response to a specific stimulus and is not under conscious control. However, Pavlov noted that the dogs would often begin salivating in the absence of food and smell. He quickly realized that this salivary response was not due to an automatic, physiological process.
Based on his observations, Pavlov suggested that the salivation was a learned response. Pavlov's dog subjects were responding to the sight of the research assistants' white lab coats, which the animals had come to associate with the presentation of food. Unlike the salivary response to the presentation of food, which is an unconditioned reflex, salivating to the expectation of food is a conditioned reflex.
Pavlov then focused on investigating exactly how these conditioned responses are learned or acquired. In a series of experiments, he set out to provoke a conditioned response to a previously neutral stimulus.
He opted to use food as the unconditioned stimulus , or the stimulus that evokes a response naturally and automatically. The sound of a metronome was chosen to be the neutral stimulus. By creating additional fistulas along the digestive system and collecting the various secretions, he could measure their quantity and chemical properties in great detail. That research won him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. All human resources—art, religion, literature, philosophy, and the historical sciences—all have joined in the attempt to throw light upon this darkness.
But humanity has at its disposal yet another powerful resource—natural science with its strict objective methods. Pavlov had become a spokesman for the scientific method, but he was not averse to generalizing from his results. Ivan Pavlov was born in in the provincial Russian city of Ryazan, the first of ten children. As the son of a priest, he attended church schools and the theological seminary.
But he struggled with religion from an early age and, in , left the seminary to study physiology and chemistry at St. Petersburg University. His father was furious, but Pavlov was undeterred. He never felt comfortable with his parents—or, as this biography makes clear, with almost anyone else.
Pavlov entered the intellectual world of St. Petersburg at an ideal moment for a man eager to explore the rules that govern the material world. The tsar had freed the serfs in , helping to push Russia into the convulsive century that followed.
The Soviets would soon assign religion to the dustbin of history, but Pavlov got there ahead of them. For him, there was no religion except the truth.
Pavlov was not a pleasant person. Todes presents him as a volatile child, a difficult student, and, frequently, a nasty adult. As a member of the liberal intelligentsia, he was opposed to restrictive measures aimed at Jews, but in his personal life he freely voiced anti-Semitic sentiments. In lectures, Pavlov insisted that medicine had to be grounded in science, on data that could be explained, verified, and analyzed, and on studies that could be repeated.
To study them, he introduced a rigorous experimental approach that helped transform medical research. He recognized that meaningful changes in physiology could be assessed only over time. Rather than experiment on an animal once and then kill it, as was common, Pavlov needed to keep his dogs alive.
The dogs may have been irreplaceable, but their treatment would undoubtedly cause an outcry today. Todes writes that in early experiments Pavlov was constantly stymied by the difficulty of keeping his subjects alive after operating on them. One particularly productive dog had evidently set a record by producing active pancreatic juice for ten days before dying. The loss was a tremendous disappointment to Pavlov. He spent years researching this biography and has made excellent use of archives in Russia, Europe, and the United States.
No scholar of Pavlov or of the disciplines he inspired will be able to ignore this achievement. No minutia appears to have been too obscure to include. Trial 9 fits trial 1 more snugly than does trial 5 in terms of total secretion, but the amount of secretion more than doubles in the second hour, contrasting sharply with the slight decline in trial 1. After a few pairings the dogs salivated when they heard the bell even when no food was given.
The bell had become the conditioned stimulus and salivation had become the conditioned response. The dogs had learnt to associate the bell with the food and the sound of the bell and salivation was triggered by the sound of the bell. Pavlov showed that classical conditioning leads to learning by association. McLeod, S. Pavlov's dogs. Simply Psychology.
Pavlov, I. Lectures on conditioned reflexes. Translated by W. Gantt London: Allen and Unwin. Watson, J. Psychology as the behaviorist Views It. Psychological Review, 20 , Toggle navigation. Download this article as a PDF. How to reference this article: McLeod, S.
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