Pavlov, Ivan P.

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849–1936) was a Russian physiologist who developed one of the two basic procedures used to study behavioral change in the laboratory. His procedure is variously called Pavlovian, classical, or respondent conditioning. In the Pavlovian procedure, the learner is presented with a “neutral” stimulus, followed closely in time by a stimulus that already elicits behavior. In Pavlov's laboratory, the neutral stimulus was commonly the ticking sound of a metronome, and the eliciting stimulus was food that elicited salivation. After a number of pairings of the ticking sound with food, the sound alone could evoke [Page 428]salivation. Thus, the procedure produced a new relation between the environment and behavior: the sound-salivation relation. The second procedure used to study behavioral change is called operant ...