I said: > >This leads to an intriguing mystery: why is it so widely believed that > Pavlov used a bell in salivary conditioning when he didn't?
to which Rainer Scheuchenpflug replied: > > as far as I remember an attempt to answer to your question may be found in > Goodwin, C. J. (1991). Misportraying Pavlov's apparatus. _American Journal > of Psychology, 104_, 135-141. > > Goodwin traced the origins of the drawing one normally finds in textbooks > when Pavlovian conditioning is described, which was not made by Pavlov. As Mike Palij noted, Goodwin's paper concerned an illustration often claimed to be of Pavlov's experimental apparatus but which really depicted the apparatus used by G. F. Nicolai. The misattributed drawing first appeared in English in Yerkes and Morgulis (1909). Goodwin also provided an illustration of the experimental apparatus which did in fact come from Pavlov, in his 1928 work _Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes_. I belatedly reply (don't get back to my office as often as I once did): the article is revealing but does not solve the mystery of Pavlov's bell. What it shows is that neither in the early NIcolai apparatus mistakenly taken to be Pavlov's nor in the correct Pavlov illustration is there a bell anywhere in evidence. The Nicolai drawing does not show a conditioned stimulus at all. But as Goodwin pointed out, if you look closely at the illustration from Pavlov, you can make out leads attached to the front and hind leg of the dog, the purpose of which was likely to provide a tactile conditioned stimulus. But such is the power of the Pavlov-bell myth that some authors felt compelled to alter these drawings to bring them into conformity with what everybody knows. For example, Petri and Govern, in their textbook _Motivation (5th ed. 2004), add what appears to be an alarm bell to the Nicolai drawing. And another textbook accurately reprints Pavlov's illustration with one tiny addition: a small handbell which sits on the desk of the experimenter! If anyone has any other illustrations altered to show a bell, I'd be happy to see them (I'm not referring to the usual fanciful depictions which routinely show a bell, but only to those which make "improvements" to one of the historical illustrations, such as the two which appear in Goodwin). Stephen ______________________________ Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. Department of Psychology Bishop's University Lennoxville, QC J1M 1Z7 Canada [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dept web page: www.ubishops.ca/ccc/div/soc/psy TIPS discussion list for psychology teachers at: faculty.frostburg.edu/psyc/southerly/tips/index.htm ______________________________________ --- To make changes to your subscription go to: http://acsun.frostburg.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=tips&text_mode=0&lang=english
