Pavlov Born: Pioneer of Behavioral Science

Pavlov didn't set out to study learning. He was studying digestion. Specifically, how dogs salivated when presented with food. Then he noticed the dogs were salivating before the food arrived, when they heard the footsteps of the lab assistant who usually brought it. The association had been learned without any intention. He spent the next thirty years mapping the mechanism with extraordinary precision, using surgical procedures to redirect saliva ducts through the cheek so he could measure individual drops. He called the original response unconditioned. The learned response: conditioned. The implications went everywhere psychology had yet to go. He received the Nobel Prize in 1904 for the digestion work, not the conditioning work. But conditioning made him more famous. Born in Ryazan, Russia in 1849, Pavlov was the son of a village priest and originally enrolled in seminary before abandoning theology for natural science at the University of St. Petersburg. His early career focused entirely on the physiology of the circulatory and digestive systems, and his meticulous experimental techniques in measuring gastric function earned him the Nobel. The conditioning discoveries came almost accidentally during those digestion experiments, when he realized that the "psychic secretions" his dogs produced in anticipation of food were as measurable and predictable as the reflexive responses. His concept of the conditioned reflex became the foundation of behaviorist psychology, influencing John Watson and B.F. Skinner's work in the United States. Pavlov himself remained skeptical of psychology as a discipline, insisting his work was purely physiological.