Ivan Pavlov

Ivan Pavlov

By:

Monica Alsup

Stephanie Roark

Samantha Williams

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was born in Russia and was a physician, psychologist, and physiologist. He was well known for his Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1904 for research on the digestive system. He later died in February of 1936. His biggest and most well known accomplishment was for his experience now known as classical conditioning. Pavlov did most of his research studies with dogs and focused on the gastric function of dogs. Pavlov was a very structured and organized man. His daily routine habits always occurred at the same time slot every day. He ate lunch at a specific time every day, he went to bed at a specific time every day, and even fed his dogs at a specific time every day. He later changed his behaviors and suffered from insomnia when his son died in the White Army.

In classical conditioning, a previously neutral stimulus acquires the capacity to elicit a response by its association with a stimulus that already elicits that response. Classical conditioning is a type of associative learning. He described the learning of conditioned behavior as being formed by pairing stimuli to condition an animal into giving a response. Classical conditioning focused on reflexed behavior. Any reflex can be conditioned to respond to a formerly neutral stimulus. A view of classical conditioning restricted to reflexes has been abandoned in recent years, and voluntary responses to conditioned stimuli have made important contributions to the field.

There are two competing theories of classical conditioning and how it works. The first one is called stimulus-response theory. It suggests that an association with the unconditioned stimulus is made with the conditioned stimulus without the brain, but without involving conscious though. The other