Pavlov

• Aim: to explore the role of conditioned reflexes in the eating behaviour of dogs. To explore how salivation becomes associated with new stimuli apparently unrelated to food and the properties of this association.
• Experimental procedure

  1. Collect saliva from salivary glands of immobilised dog

  2. Observe and measure saliva production by volume or number of drops in a cannula

  3. Conduct experiment in soundproof chamber to minimise effects of extraneous variables like noise
• Pavlov's experiment


  1. Measure salivation in response to neutral stimulus (NS)

  2. Pair NS with unconditioned stimulus (UCS) of food, around 20 times

  3. Vary presentation so NS is before or after UCS

  4. Investigate extinction and spontaneous recovery of salivation by presenting NS without conditioned stimulus (CS) several times
• Findings: NS (bell) didn’t initially elicit a salivation response, the UCS of food elicited immediate salivation. After pairing the NS and UCS, the NS now elicited salivation.
• A strength of this study is that Pavlov used carefully controlled experiments with the environment of the dogs controlled completely, except for the variables being tested. The studies took place within a soundproof chamber to reduce the possibility of any external sounds interfering with the conditioning of the bell sound. The collection of saliva directly with a cannula prevented any loss of saliva. Therefore, this makes it more likely that salivation in response to the conditioned stimulus was due to conditioning rather than to extraneous variables.
• A weakness is that there may be problems trying to generalise the behaviour to human examples as the study was conducted on dogs. This is because humans have structurally different brains from other mammals e.g., a very large, developed pre-frontal cortex which allows for cognitive processing and conscious choice, and therefore humans respond differently in similar experimental conditions. This is particularly important since behaviourists such as Pavlov believed that animals and humans learned in exactly the same ways – modern brain scan technology tells us that this is not necessarily true.