Ivan Pavlov

For our last week of class in London, we discussed behaviorism and all of the important people who were involved in the behaviorist school of psychology.  One of the most well-known behaviorist was Ivan Petrovich Pavlov.  Pavlov was born in 1849 in Ryazan, Russia, where he lived with his parents and ten other siblings.  Pavlov was originally interested in studying theology, attending the Ryazan Church School, but shortly after became fascinated by Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, therefore changing his study of interest to science, but more specifically physics and math.

 In 1870 he attended the University of Saint Petersberg, where he focused on physiology and in his fourth year there he completed his research project on the nerves of the pancreas.  He also helped found the Department of Physiology at the Institute of Experimental Medicine where he worked for 45 more years.  After receiving many awards for his accomplishments at the university and finally graduating, he decided to continue his education at the Academy of Medical Surgery.  Eventually Pavlov became an assistant at the Veterinary Institute were he did some research on the circulatory system for his dissertation.

Toward the end of the 19^th Century, Ivan Pavlov began conducting experiments on digestive systems of dogs. He noticed that the dogs would salivate in response to cues of food instead of the actual food. Pavlov knew that dogs don’t learn to salivate for food; it’s a natural reflex response, so he decided to test if he could tech reflex responses in reaction to a new learned stimulus. He set up an experiment where he would pair a specific bell tone every time the food was presented. The two variables were presented simultaneously, the food and the bell, and this process continued until the dogs learned to associate the sound of the bell with the presentation of food, casing the dog to salivate simply to the sound of a bell with the expectation that food was on the way. When the bell is paired with the food before the animal makes the association, it is called the unconditioned stimuli, while the unconditioned response is the dog’s salivation for the food. After the association is made, the simple sound of the bell would be the conditioned stimulus while the conditioned response would be the dog salivating to a simple sound of a bell. Pavlov’s discovery was completely accidental but the results of his experimentation changed the world of behaviorism and opened the gate to understanding learning behavior.

It is important to note that although Pavlov never called himself a psychologist nor did he particularly like the field of psychology, he had major impact on it.

http://www.simplypsychology.org/pavlov.html

Nick Martin

Olivia Foley