The Pros Of Pavlovian Conditioning

Do dogs produce salivate? Do dogs produce salivate when given food? In the 1890’s, Russian psychologist, Ivan Pavlov put the question to the test and looked into the amount of salivation produced by dogs in response to being given food and “demonstrating the way in classical conditioning (also referred to as Pavlovian conditioning) could be used to cultivate a particular association between the occurrence of one event in the anticipation of another.” (Pavlov’s Dogs and Classical Conditioning, 2018)

From the experiment, Pavlov proved the existence of an unconditional response from a “dog by presenting a dog with a bowl of food and measuring exactly how much saliva it produces”( Mcleod,2015) as shown in image 1. Pavlov, however, did discover that no matter what the object was or even what the dogs learned to associate with its food (e.g. lab assistant) would trigger the same response from the dog which led him to believe that he did indeed make a scientific discovery.

Pavlov allocated each dog to a secluded environment (room) and restrained them in a harness with a bowl of ‘food’ placed right in front of them with a device attached, which was used to

This led Pavlov to pair a bell (as a neutral stimulus) with the experiment to see if the bell could trigger the saliva produced by the dogs, which led the bell to be a critical part of the experiment, which would be rung every time before he gave the dogs their food. Like Pavlov expected, the dogs salivate levels would begin to increase due to the bell ringing. During the experiment, Pavlov divided the group of dogs into two groups in which one group must be conditioned to react to the bell rung before the food was given and the other group should not react at