Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex

by Ivan Pavlov

Book Overview

2015 Reprint of 1927 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition. Not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Pavlov's description on how animals (and humans) can be trained to respond in a certain way to a particular stimulus drew tremendous interest from the time he first presented his results. His work paved the way for a new, more objective method of studying behavior. The impact on Pavlov's work on all subsequent psychological thought...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1614277982
• ISBN13: 9781614277989
• Release Date: March 2015
• Publisher: Martino Fine Books
• Length: 450 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.7" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

THE FOUNDING WORK OF "CLASSICAL CONDITIONING"

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849-1936) was a Russian physiologist, psychologist, and physician, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1904 for research pertaining to the digestive system. "Pavlov's dogs" have an almost legendary status in textbooks on psychology. What he did was to perform an operation on the dogs consisting of "the transplantation of the opening of the salivary duct from its natural place on the mucous membrane of the mouth to the outside skin." (Pg. 18) Thus, he was able to "precisely" measure their rate of salivation for his experiments, and condition them to salivate at the ringing of a bell, which preceded their being fed. (Later, he admitted that "This method naturally suffers from fundamental disadvantages, since it involves the roughest forms of mechanical interference and the crude dismembering of an organ of a most delicate structure and function.") (Pg. 320) Here are some representative quotations from his book: Conditioned reflexes "proceed according to rigid laws as do any other physiological processes, and must be regarded as being in every sense a part of the physiological activity of living beings." (Pg. 25) "The method of conditioned reflexes, however, gives over the study of the whole of this most important function of nervous analysis into the hands of the purely experimental physiologist. With the help of conditioned reflexes the scope and limits of the analysing functions in different animals can be exactly determined, and the laws regulating this function made clear." (Pg. 111) "But what our experiments do most emphatically refute is the doctrine of special 'association' centres, or, more generally, of the existence in the hemispheres of some special area on which the higher functions of the nervous system depend." (Pg. 376) "It would be the height of presumption to regard these first steps in elucidating the physiology of the cortex as solving the intricate problems of the higher psychic activities in man, when in fact the present stage of our work no detailed application of its results to man is yet permissible." (Pg. 395) "I do not feel either safe or justified in proceeding in my comparison beyond the above observations, and these should not be taken as in any sense explaining the incalculably complex systems observed in man, but only as showing that a comparison of a general nature can even now be made." (Pg. 401) "I want to repeat that all the experiments ... which have set as their object a purely physiological interpretation of the activity of the higher nervous system, I regard as being in the nature only of a preliminary inquiry, which has however, I fully believe, entirely justified its inception." (PG. 410-411)