Pavlov question

[Yllaria]

Can anyone in the teeming millions confirm something that I read on an Animaniacs website - the geocities one with the cultural references pages - www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Lot/2636/crg/.

The statement is: 'Pavlov wanted saliva to study (his Nobel prize was for digestive system research) and wasn’t really interested in conditioned response, per se. (ES) "

Was Pavlov’s famous discovery really peripheral to his line of research? Did he realize it was important, or did other people stumble across it and spread the word?

Yllaria

“Scientists tell us that the fastest animal on earth, with a top speed of 120 ft/sec, is a cow that has been dropped out of a helicopter.” – Dave Barry

[Duckster]

The work that made Pavlov a household name in psychology actually began as a study in digestion. He was looking at the digestive process in dogs, especially the interaction between salivation and the action of the stomach. He realized they were closely linked by reflexes in the autonomic nervous system. Without salivation, the stomach didn’t get the message to start digesting. Pavlov wanted to see if external stimuli could affect this process, so he rang a bell at the same time he gave the experimental dogs food. After a while, the dogs – which before only salivated when they saw and ate their food – would begin to salivate when the bell rang, even if no food were present. In 1903 Pavlov published his results calling this a “conditioned reflex,” different from an innate reflex, such as yanking a hand back from a flame, in that it had to be learned. Pavlov called this learning process (in which the dog’s nervous system comes to associate the bell with the food, for example) “conditioning.” He also found that the conditioned reflex will be repressed if the stimulus proves “wrong” too often. If the bell rings repeatedly and no food appears, eventually the dog stops salivating at the bell.

Source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bhpavl.html

[Duck_Duck_Goose]

Google, “Pavlov saliva”.

Yes, apparently he originally got started studying digestion in mammals, for which he won his Nobel, and then got sidetracked onto the conditioned response thing.

http://www.nobel.se/medicine/educational/pavlov/readmore.html

The Russian scientist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was born in 1849 in Ryazan, where his father worked as a village priest. In 1870 Ivan Pavlov abandoned the religious career for which he had been preparing, and instead went into science. There he had a great impact on the field of physiology by studying the mechanisms underlying the digestive system in mammals.

For his original work in this field of research, Pavlov was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1904. By then he had turned to studying the laws on the formation of conditioned reflexes, a topic on which he worked until his death in 1936. His discoveries in this field paved the way for an objective science of behavior.

As for realizing whether it was “important”, no, I don’t think they had any idea of the sociological or psychological human ramifications–it was just an interesting phenomenon which deserved further exploration.

[Duck_Duck_Goose]

What he won the Nobel for, exactly.

http://www.xrefer.com/entry/171566

. In 1890 Pavlov became professor of physiology at the Imperial Medical Academy and started his researches into the physiology of digestion. Using a skilful surgical technique that enabled part of the stomach to be isolated from pancreatic and salivary secretions while maintaining its nerve supply intact, Pavlov showed that gastric secretion in dogs could be stimulated by the sight of food and by nerve stimulation via the brain. It was this work, published in translation as Lectures on the Work of the Digestive Glands (1902), that earned Pavlov his Nobel Prize.

In 1898 Pavlov began his work on conditioned reflexes, using unanaesthetized dogs with externalized salivary glands, which was to occupy him for the next thirty years.

Nobels are commonly awarded years after the actual research, so he was already busy studying conditioning by the time he got the award for proving that dogs begin to salivate at the sight of food.

[Yllaria]

Thanks guys. I appreciate this.

[Duckster]

Looks like you got all your ducks in a row on this one!

[Yllaria]

And it re-affirms my faith in the Animaniacs.