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Ivan Pavlov: Dogs
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Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov achieved scienific immortality for his discovery of the conditioned reflex. Pavlov's interests as physician and scientist were initially centered upon blood pressure, respiration and the digestive tract, which he studied in dogs.
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Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (September 14, 1849 - February 27, 1936) was a Russian physiologist who first described the phenomenon now known as conditioning in experiments with dogs. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1904.
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During the first phase of his scientific activity (1874-1888), Pavlov developed operative-surgical techniques that enabled him to perform experiments on unanesthetized animals without inflicting much pain. He studied the circulatory system, particularly the oscillation of blood pressure under various controlled conditions and the regulation of cardiac activity. He noted that the blood pressure of his dogs hardly varied despite the feeding of dry food or excessive amounts of meat broth. In his examination of cardiac activity he was able to observe the special nerve fibers that controlled the rhythm and the strength of the heartbeat. His theory was that the heart is regulated by four specific nerve fibers; it is now generally accepted that the vagus and sympathetic nerves produce the effects on the heart that Pavlov noticed.
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Pavlov began experiments on the digestive activities of dogs. This included, quite simply, studying the saliva and gastric juices which are produced reflexively when food is placed into a dog’s mouth. However, over the course of the experiments, Pavlov noted that the dogs began to salivate when other environmental clues associated with food delivery were presented. Thus, the sound of a ticking metronome which always preceded food delivery could cause the dogs to begin to salivate. Perhaps this does not seem a profound insight on Pavlov’s part. But what he had inadvertently discovered was that inborn reflexes (such as the salivary reflex) could be conditioned to environmental stimuli (such as ticking metronomes).
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Pavlov continued working with conditioned reflexes throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, generating several addition principles through further experimentation. The principle of timing dictated that the neutral stimulus must precede the unconditioned reflex in order to become a conditioned stimulus. (In other words, a buzzer would have to go off before food was offered to a dog in order for the dog to associate the food and buzzer with each other). The concept of extinction referred to the fact that a conditioned response could be "unlearned" if the neutral stimulus (buzzer) was repeatedly used without reinforcement (food). Generalization was the name given to the observation that a stimulus similar to the conditioned stimulus would still produce a response as the dog generalized from its original experience to a similar one, but the response would be less pronounced in proportion to the difference between the stimuli. Finally, testing the limits of the dogs' ability to differentiate among stimuli led, unexpectedly, to experimental
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Pavlov's dogs are a popular topic. Does the name Pavlov ring a bell? A lot of fascinating research examines the history of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849-1936), who lived in and during the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Much of the research about Pavlov examines his work on conditioned reflexes and how it influenced other ideas, even brainwashing. One example is the book "Brainwashing from Pavlov to Powers" by Edward Hunter. Most commentary would improve with more information about Pavlav's impact in the United States.
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