Classical Conditioning
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov
September 26, 1849 - February 27, 1936
Classical Conditioning was advanced by a serendipitous finding of Ivan Pavlov. The word serendipitous means accidental discovery. Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, was studying digestion when he stumbled on the phenomenon that made him one of the most famous psychologists in the twentieth century. Subsequently, Classical Conditioning is sometimes called Pavlovian Conditioning because it was discovered by Ivan Pavlov.
As a physiologist, it was Pavlov’s ambition to discover the neural mechanisms that control glandular secretions during digestion. Pavlov used dogs as his subjects as he exposed the dogs' salivary glands and measured the amount of salivation.