Classical Conditioning

1903

Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936)

Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov insisted that the scientific study of the nervous system and its expressions must be objective, mechanistic, and materialistic in orientation. Pavlov was born and reared in central Russia, the son of a village priest. Initially, it seemed as though Pavlov would follow in his father’s footsteps, but a growing personal interest in science led him to the University of Saint Petersburg, where he earned a degree in physiology.

By 1890, Pavlov was the director of the department of physiology at the university’s Institute of Experimental Medicine. Pavlov’s specialty was the study of digestion, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1904. Dogs were Pavlov’s subject of choice for his experiments. When his work on digestion in the stomach came to an end, Pavlov began to study salivation as a necessary part of the digestive processes. In 1903, one of the dog handlers in Pavlov’s laboratory observed that the dogs began salivation even before they were fed. When this came to Pavlov’s attention, he experimentally investigated what he called the “psychic processes” involved in the phenomenon.

Pavlov explored how external stimuli could be manipulated to control behavior. His most famous example came to be called classical conditioning in English. It was a convincing demonstration that when a ringing bell is presented in association with the offering of food, dogs will become conditioned, or learn, to salivate even without food being offered. Pavlov claimed that such conditioning was a matter of processes in the nervous system itself and not a matter of the mind. Thus learning in the dog, and by extension in humans and other animals, was a matter of forming elementary associations that then led to the formation of chains of associations. For many years, Pavlov and his team explored the implications of his model of learning, including how it might explain mental disorders.

SEE ALSO Experimental Neurosis (1912), Behaviorism (1913), Rattus norvegicus var. albinus (1929)

Ivan Pavlov in his laboratory, 1922.

Bronze statue of Pavlov and one of his dogs, located on the grounds of his laboratory in Koltushi, Russia.