Background
On September 14, 1849, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was born in Ryazan, Russia. Son of Peter Dmitrievich Pavlov and Varvara Ivanovna Uspenskaya, Ivan was the oldest of eleven siblings in his religious household. His father, Peter, was a village priest and his mother, Varvara, was a housewife. Ivan went to a church school where he studied theology until his interests pursued him to study scientific pursuit. As a young boy, his biggest inspirations were D.I. Pisarev, I.M. Sechenov, and Charles Darwin. Rather than pursuing a career in religion, Ivan went on to enroll at the University of St. Petersburg in 1870 where he studied physiology and chemistry. Graduating with a degree in 1875 of …show more content…
In his first attempt, a person with a lab coat would give the dog food. The dog would salivate because mammals produce saliva when they need to digest their food. After the first feeding, even when the person did not have the food, the dog would salivate because it associated the lab coats and the food together. Ivan decided to use a different stimuli in another experiment to test what he called, classical conditioning. He would ring a bell each time he would feed the dogs. The dogs then associated the sound of the bell with food, causing them to salivate. In his attempt of understanding this concept, he explained it as classical conditioning where there would be a neutral stimulus, unconditioned stimulus, and an unconditioned response. In the second study using the bell, the neutral stimulus would be the bell because it does not cause the salivation until presented with the unconditioned stimulus being the food. This leads to the unconditioned response being the salivation. With both stimuli together, this is associative learning or conditioned response because the subject links the two with one another. In 1903, he shared his findings about “The Experimental Psychology and Psychopathology of Animals,” with the scientists of the 14th International Medical