Ivan Pavlov Biography

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov is famous as the man behind experiments that showed the relationship between a stimulus and a conditioned response.

He studied medicine in Russia and Germany, accepting posts in St. Petersburg as a professor in pharmacology and physiology.

In 1889 Pavlov began experiments with dogs that proved their reflexes could be conditioned by external stimuli. He measured the amount of saliva the dogs produced when a feeding bowl was placed in front of them, and soon noticed that they began salivating even before the food was presented.

Pavlov changed the experiment to the dogs being conditioned by the ringing of a bell at feeding time, and they would then reflexively salivate upon hearing the bell, whether or not food was present.

In 1904 Pavlov won the Nobel Prize for his work on digestive physiology, but he is most widely known today as an early influence on behavioral psychology.