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Ivan Pavlov: Dogs
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Ivan Pavlov was a Russian scientist most famous for a series of experiments that found that dogs can be trained to respond a certain way to stimulation. Pavlov trained the dogs to salivate when they heard a bell because during training, the bell was always accompanied by food.
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While Ivan Pavlov worked to unveil the secrets of the digestive system, he ... studied what signals triggered related phenomena, such as the secretion of saliva. When a dog encounters food, saliva starts to pour from the salivary glands located in the back of its oral cavity. This saliva is needed in order to make the food easier to swallow. The fluid also contains enzymes that break down certain compounds in the food. In humans, for example, saliva contains the enzyme amylase, an effective processor of starch.
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Ivan Pavlov, in 1927, began working with learning through "classical conditioning." Initially the dog only salivated when it was eating. Later Pavlov noticed the dog salivated when he carried the food into the room. He become curious as to why this change had taken place. He thought there were both learned and unlearned components to the dog's behavior. He began experimenting with different stimuli, and if he rang a bell immediately before giving food to the dog, eventually the dog would salivate merely in response to the sound of the bell. He generated terminology to describe his observations.
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In the 1890s, Pavlov investigated the workings of the digestive system—focusing on digestive secretions— using special surgically created openings in the digestive tracts of dogs, a project strongly influenced by the work of an earlier physiologist, Ivan Sechenov (1829-1905). As a result of this research, Pavlov was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1904. During his investigations in this area, Pavlov observed that normal, healthy dogs would salivate upon seeing their keeper, apparently in anticipation of being fed. This led him, through a systematic series of experiments, to formulate the principles of the conditioned response, which he believed could be applied to humans as well as to animals. According to Pavlov's system, an unconditioned stimulus, such as offering food to a dog, produced a response, or unconditioned reflex, that required no training (salivation). In contrast, a normally neutral act, such as ringing a bell, became a conditioned stimulus when associated with the offering of food and eventually would produce salivation ... but as a conditioned reflex.
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Ivan Petrovich Pavlov studied medicine in Russia and Germany, accepting posts in St. Petersburg as a professor in pharmacology and physiology. In 1889 Pavlov began experiments with dogs that proved their reflexes could be conditioned by external stimuli. Specifically, after they were conditioned by the ringing of a bell at feeding time, they would reflexively salivate upon hearing the bell, whether or not food was present. In 1904 Pavlov won the Nobel Prize for his work on digestive physiology, but he is most widely known today as an early influence on behavioral psychology.
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In an experiment that made him a household name, the Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov a century ago got dogs used to hearing a bell every time they were fed. The dogs soon started drooling whenever they heard the bell.
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