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Ivan pavlov (Click to select text)
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849-1936), world famous Russian physiologist became second to Freud as the most influential psychologist of our century. Pavlov was a follower of "The father of Russian psychology," Sechenov, whose theory was that the reflex is the essence of all reactions. Pavlov went further and discovered that the conditional reflex is a response, which is not directly connected with the stimulus, but caused by association with a previous experience. The conditioned reflex was discovered in the following experiment on a dog. A bell rung just before a dog was fed; the dog salivated on receiving its food. After repeated trials, the dog would salivate whenever the bell sounded, even if no meat powder was being presented. The dog salivated in response to the bell ring. Pavlov decided that the food was an unconditioned stimulus, the salivation in response to the food was an unconditioned reflex,while the sound of the bell was the conditioned stimulus. Only the salivation to stimulus of the bell alone was the conditioned reflex. More than that, Pavlov found that the conditioned reflex was formed easier when the unconditioned stimulus followed the conditioned one;the conditioned reflex was formed easier, if the conditioned stimulus occurred very close in time to the unconditioned stimulus, if the bell louder, or if the dog was trained on larger pieces of meat the amount of salivation would be larger. This discovery was very important because the conditioned reflex was basic to the understanding of the mechanism of change in human and animal behavior.Thus scientists came to understand that behavior is no longer limited by a fixed, inherited reflex, but can be modified by experience and exposure to an unlimited number of stimuli. Aristotle had already talked about it, but Pavlov was the first scientist who demonstrated this system of associations. Association is "mental connection between ideas." These associations were not presented at birth; they were developed through experience -they were learned-hence the relationship between stimulus and response. An association is to the learning psychologist what the "atom" is to the physicist the "gene" is to the geneticist. Pavlov's contribution is related to the total learning process in higher animals. The reflex concept had a tremendous influence on the process of psychological thinking. It also caused an enormous spate of research in the psychology of behavior in the early 20 century. Through the conditioned reflex the study of association became the basic starting point of modern science and technology. Pavlov generated a whole school of followers, for example, behaviorists such E.R Guthrie, C.L Hull, and B.F Skinner; who based their explanation of psychological actions as the conditioned or learned responses to extermal and internal stimuli(conditioned reflex.) Pavlov's reports of conditioning experiments and his book "Reflexes of the Brain" was translated into 29 different languages. There is a town in Russia, named Pavlovo, in the memory of Ivan Pavlov. It is a scientific community, where research laboratories and neuropsychic clinics and young children's experimental schools flourish.Furthermore, Pavlov's importance is that he brought back to life the subject of association, that had been forgotten sicne Aristotle. His findings, related to the conditional reflex, are the basis to the understanding of the mechanism of change in people and animals. This discovery changed the views of psychology regarding behavior.
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