In the study of physics, for example, a scientist might study.
the behavior of a small ball rolling down a ramp. He or she hopes that the principles discovered in this simple experiment will apply to complex situations found in everyday life such as the movement of cars and airplanes. Psychologists hope that once we understand the relationship between simple stimuli and responses, we can begin to understand the more complex ones found in everyday human behavior outside the laboratory.
The Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlov devoted his entire life to science. Pavlov became famous for the scientific study of digestion in dogs. His experiments showed that digestion started in the mouth and that saliva was an important.
part of the digestive process. This led him to the discovery of the salivary gland and the salivary reflex. Pavlov found that putting food powder on a dog's tongue would trigger the salivary reflex (Pavlov, 1897/1902). He won a Nobel Prize in.
1904 for this work. It was another discovery, though, that made him famous in the field of psychology. In his laboratory, Pavlov began to notice that some of his dogs were starting to salivate before he put the food powder on their tongues.
Some would salivate at the sight of the food powder or even the sight of the spoon used to deliver the powder. Some of the dogs even began to salivate when they saw Pavlov's assistant bringing in the food (Vul'fson, 1898 as cited in Todes,.
1997). .
When Pavlov investigated further, he found that the longer the dogs had been in the laboratory, the more likely they were to make these astonishing responses. New dogs would only respond to the food powder itself. Pavlov had thought of the salivary reflex as being like an electrical circuit. He thought that putting the food on the dog's tongue completed the circuit and caused the dog to salivate. Pavlov believed that the process was just like the way flipping a light switch completes a circuit and turns on the light.
