The official website of Ivan Petrovitch Pavlov (1849-1936) seems to be at the Institute of Experimental Medicine of St. Petersburg, where Pavlov worked for 46 years. You can find there an extended biography, some photographs and a description of the working environment of Pavlov (inclusive the Tower of Silence where the dogs were kept).
This post contains some links and historical material about classical (Pavlovian) conditioning. The page will be updated each time new material becomes available. Watson’s Little Albert experiment and the software “Sniffy the rat” are described in separate posts.
The first time Pavlov made public his ideas about classical conditioning outside Russia was at the XIV International Medical Congress of Madrid of 1903; see Campos Bueno & Araguz (2012) for a detailed description. At that same congress Ramón y Cajal presented his neuron doctrine. According to the local Science journal correspondent however, “No discoveries of an epoch-making character appear to have been presented to the congress, …” (Campos Bueno & Araguz, 2012, p. 13)! Unfortunately, the text of Pavlov’s presentation (in French) was not published in the proceedings of the congress. Presumably, the first English text was the publication in Science of Pavlov’s lecture “The scientific investigation of the psychical faculties or processes in the higher animals” at Charing Cross Hospital on October 1, 1906. This text was soon followed by a report of Yerkes and Morgulis in Psychological Bulletin (Yerkes and Morgulis, 1909). Before 1927, Pavlov’s work outside Russia was mainly known through these conferences and short papers. This changed in 1927. G.V. Anrep published his translation in English of the set of lectures that Pavlov had given in 1924. The book was titled “Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex” (Pavlov, 1927). It provided a comprehensive and detailed account of research that took place over the previous twenty-five years in Pavlov’s laboratory.
There is a lot of myth and smoke surrounding Pavlov’s work, probably because of the difficulties of translation from Russian and also because Pavlov himself was not very fluent in English (Catania and Laties, 1999). It started right away with the translation of the basic terminology, e.g. (un)conditioned versus (un)conditional. In the 1906 lecture, Pavlov apparently agreed (provisionally) with the translation ‘conditioned’.
All stimuli introduced into the mouth of the dog unfailingly give a positive result in reference to the secretion of saliva, but the same objects when presented to the eye, the ear, etc., may be sometimes efficient and sometimes not. In consequence of the last-mentioned fact, we have provisionally called the new reflexes ‘conditioned reflexes,’ and for the sake of distinction we have called the old ones ‘unconditioned.’Pavlov, 1906, p. 615.
In footnote 3 (Yerkes and Morgulis (1909) indicated that both translations are possible.
Conditioned and unconditioned are the terms used in the only discussion of this subject by Pawlow [German transcription of Pavlov’s name] which has appeared in English. The Russian terms, however, have as their English equivalents conditional and unconditional. But as it seems highly probable that Professor Pawlow sanctioned the terms conditioned and unconditioned, which appear in the Huxley Lecture (Lancet, 1906), we shall use them.Yerkes and Morgulis, 1909, p. 259 (footnote 3)
Pavlov’s experiment, according to the Nobel prize committee
There is also a big dispute (!) about ‘the bell'; see for example the discussion at psycoloquy. Traditionally, Pavlov’s experiments are described as presenting food to a dog after ringing a bell as in the picture from the Nobel prize website. Pavlov and his pupils used, next to food, several other materials as rocks, fluids (acid), metronome, flashes, …, occasionally a ringing bell. Most textbooks also show the wrong picture of the apparatus, which was probably devised by Nicolai, a student of Pavlov.
And, of course, there is also some disagreement about who discovered classical conditioning. The original experiments were done primarily by Pavlov’s collaborator Dr. I.F. Tolochinov (Clark, 2004). There is also an American investigator, E.B. Twitmyer, who independently from Pavlov, discovered the conditioning process with the knee-jerk reflex. You can find the story at Twitmyer’s alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania.
Some film material exists about the conditioning experiments of Pavlov. The next video from Zimbardo contains some original footage (from 0:18″ – 1:52″). The documentary “The brain: A secret history” (BBC) is about behaviour control and also put forward the less known and more disturbing but in my opinion unproven claim that Pavlov did not limit his experiments to dogs. In part 1, the work of I.P. Pavlov (from 05:20″ – 08:30″) and B.F. Skinner (09:00″ – 16:15″) is discussed, intermingled with original video fragments. The following video is an informative but nicely recreated conditioning experiment.
The Spanish Journal of Psychology has devoted an entire number (2003, 6, 2) on the impact of Pavlov’s work on European psychological science.
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