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Ivan Pavlov: Animals
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Ivan Pavlov is remembered for explaining animal behaviour in terms of conditioned automatic reflexes, a theory which greatly appealed to the Soviet dictatorship when applied to human beings. It is perhaps surprising then that Pavlov (the son of a priest and himself originally educated for the priesthood) was not only an Orthodox believer but an outspoken confessor in time of persecution who used his international fame and his good standing with the regime to protect other Christians.
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Pavlov's experiment proved that all animals could be trained or conditioned to expect a consequence on the results of previous experience. For example, a child that is always given a cookie by a particular teacher will begin to expect that cookie every single time that they see the teacher. If the teacher always says the word 'yummy' before giving the cookie, the child will become conditioned to expect the cookie after hearing the word. The children would even begin to salivate at the appearance of the teacher or the word yummy after repeated conditioning.
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Beginning about 1930, Pavlov tried to apply his laws to the explanation of human psychoses. He assumed that the excessive inhibition characteristic of a psychotic person was a protective mechanism--shutting out the external world--in that it excluded injurious stimuli that had previously caused extreme excitation. In Russia this idea became the basis for treating psychiatric patients in quiet and nonstimulating external surroundings. During this period Pavlov announced the important principle of the language function in the human as based on long chains of conditioned reflexes involving words. The function of language involves not only words, he held, but an elaboration of generalizations not possible in animals lower than the human.
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Pavlov had discovered one of the key ways in which organisms learn. Reflexes are an important part of inborn survival tools, but learning to hone them through external clues makes the animal or the human much more adaptive and responsive to the nuances of the environment. A neutral event could be paired with a pleasant or an unpleasant unconditioned stimulus and the neutral signal would take on the ability to elicit the reaction. The organism is therefore in a more favourable state to meet the meal or the predator.
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By observing irregularities of secretions in normal unanesthetized animals, Pavlov was led to formulate the laws of the conditioned reflex, a subject that occupied his attention from about 1898 until 1930. He used the salivary secretion as a quantitative measure of the psychical, or subjective, activity of the animal, in order to emphasize the advantage of objective, physiological measures of mental phenomena and higher nervous activity. He sought analogies between the conditional (commonly though incorrectly translated as "conditioned") reflex and the spinal reflex.
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Las observacions basicas de Pavlov èran simplas. Se s'introdusisson d'aliments o cèrts acids diluïts en boca d'un gos afamat, comença aqueste a secretar un flux de saliva que sortís de glandolas determinadas. Observèt Pavlov que l'animal salivava tanben abans que lo manjar arribèsse dins la boca, çò que significava que la vista o l'òlga del manjar provocava una meteissa responsa fisiologica. A mai, lo gos salivava parièr davant la preséncia de la persona qu'en general li porgissiá sos aliments. Aquesta constatacion lo portèt a desvolopar un metòde experimental per estudiar l'aquesiment de connexions novèlas d'estimulacion-responsa. Sens cap mena de dobte, les quals havia observat en els seus gossos no podien ser innates o connaturals d'aquesta mena d'animal.
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