Pavlov dog drawing Annie Grossman

Who was Ivan Pavlov?

When you hear trainers talking about dog behavior, the term “classical conditioning” may come up. It sounds daunting, doesn't it– like something you should've learned in school. And it sounds potentially complex. The word “classical,” when paired with something, kind of feels like it's pointing to something that is complex and difficult, but ultimately good for you: Like “classical studies,” or “classical music.” The good news is that you don't employ Mickey Mouse to dance around with a mop in order to make “classical conditioning” understandable. Classical conditioning is simply another way of referring to “learning by association,” and it is happening all the time. Basically any time you have learned to have a good or bad feeling about  anything you weren't born knowing about, you've experienced classical conditioning.

Classical conditioning is also often called Pavlovian conditioning.

Born in Russia in 1849, Ivan Pavlov was a physician who studied digestion. His experiments were conducted on dogs. He investigated their saliva as it related to their gastric and pancreatic systems.

Pavlov’s most famous contribution to science started with what actually seemed like an annoyance at first. While studying digestion, he was measuring dog saliva, but his experiments were going awry because the contraptions he was using to collect his dogs’ saliva  were filling up before his canine subjects were presented with food. A man in a white coat entering the room was enough to get their mouth juices flowing. These “psychic secretions,” as he called them, led him to spend the next three decades studying different ways he could elicit natural responses such as salivation by pairing them with various stimuli.

Pavlov dog drawing Annie GrossmanMost of Pavlov's experiments were set up in a similar way: He would produce a stimulus like a buzzer, and then give food to the dogs. He learned that whatever preceded the food would eventually become a “conditioned stimulus,” and would ultimately cause the dogs to salivate, even if there was no food present. A natural reaction, like salivating when food appears, is called an “unconditioned stimulus” — it's something we do automatically without ever having to learn to do it. By repeatedly pairing neutral stimuli, like the buzzer, with unconditioned stimuli, like food, he saw that he could turn almost anything into a “condition stimulus,” or a stimulus that a dog could be taught to respond to in an automatic way.

Pavlov won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1904, for his work on digestion. But today you're more likely to learn about him in psych class than in biology. His discovery that environmental events could, through experience, trigger an innate reflex is now referred to as “Pavlovian Conditioning,” or “Classical Conditioning” or “Respondent Conditioning. Most simply, it can be referred to as “Learning by association.”

The ability to learn to make relevant associations with new stimuli is key to an animal's survival. Pavlov saw that all biologically successful animals, including humans, were able to learn in this way.

Understanding Pavlov in terms of training

Consider all the automatic reactions you have to things that you were not born knowing about. These are unconditioned (innate) responses that have become conditioned (learned) thanks to repeated pairings with stimuli. Think of  the conditioned responses that commonly are paired with the following conditioned stimuli. All of these are things you were not born knowing about, but may have learned to associate with certain basic emotional states.

It's important to remember that, when we're teaching by making use of associations, we're concerned with a dog's underlying feeling, and not about what they're doing.

Think about Pavlov’s dogs: What were they doing when he came in with their food? Were they crying? Barking? Peeing? Jumping up and down on one foot while wearing a sneaker and playing the banjo! Maybe! We don’t know!

Why wasn't this information recorded for posterity? Because it was irrelevant to the experiment.  Once he rang that bell, Pavlov was going to give them their food no matter what. And their association between the bell and food was forged, regardless of what they were doing.

Likewise, we associate a dollar bill with 100 pennies. You could jump up and down and play the banjo too, and that association wouldn't change.

Criteria: Zero

Very often, we do our dogs a disservice by focusing on what they're doing before we focus on how they're feeling. If, instead, we focus first on what the associations they're making in any given situation before we focus on how they're behaving, we can better our chances of getting good behaviors later on. Otherwise said, when it comes to behavior, we should always start with a criteria that is as low as possible, especially in any situation where your dog is still in the process of learning what's good and safe.

Illustrations by Annie Grossman

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Annie Grossman
annie@schoolforthedogs.com