Hi I'm not sure the distinction between buzzer and bell is as sharp as Stephen is suggesting. Here's Wikipedia on electromechanical buzzers, presumably the kind available to Pavlov.
"Early devices were based on an electromechanical system identical to an electric bell without the metal gong." So does it boil down to whether there was a "gong" at the end of the arm? Or perhaps the same device was used sometimes with and sometimes without a gong. Take care Jim Jim Clark Professor & Chair of Psychology 204-786-9757 4L41A -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, September 27, 2013 11:08 AM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: Re: [tips] Pavlov and bells On 27 Sep 2013 at 10:31, Christopher Green wrote: > Pavlov clearly used a bell sometimes. He used it repeatedly. So the > answer to the question of whether Pavlov used a bell is clearly "yes." > It is the denial that he ever used a bell that is the myth I'll concede that there are two instances where Pavlov referred to the use of a belll (not a buzzer) in salivary conditioning: 1) in the report published in _Science_ in 1906 where he noted the ineffectiveness of the "violent ringing of a bell"; and (2) in the description of a bell as a compound stimulus retrieved by Chris from _Conditioned Reflexes_. I would not describe the frequency of this use "sometimes" or "repeatedly", I would call it rare and special use, and most unlike the common concepton of how Pavlov used a bell. On the other hand, there is the evidence (or lack of it) in Pudovkin's film "Mechanics of the Brain", described in a New York Times review dated 1928 as "based on experiments made by Professor Ivan Pavlov [which] presumes to be a film digest of his many years of work". The Times review notes that the Russian representative further describes the film as depicting "twenty-seven years of uninterrupted thinking concerning the nature of animal and human behavior, and is, in fact, an animated photgraphic record of the experiments and studies of a single individual, Professor Pavlov". It includes footage of a dog salivating to the ticking of a metronome. It also includes footage of a dog showing an orienting reaction to the sound of a hand bell. It does not show a single instance of a dog salivating to the sound of a bell. This, incidentally, makes the description in Time magazine in 1928 that the film shows "dogs which dripped saliva at the sound of a bell" pure fiction (see Thomas's article (in AJP, 1997) for further examples of Time Magazine's predilection for fabrication in relation to Pavlov's adventures). Yet Wikipedia assures us: "Pavlov had learned then when a bell was rung in subsequent time with food being presented to the dog in consecutive sequences, the dog will initially salivate when the food is presented. The dog will later come to associate the ringing of the bell with the presentation of the food and salivate upon the ringing of the bell." Similarly, the Nobel Foundation tells us: "In a series of experiments, Pavlov then tried to figure out how these phenomena were linked. For example, he struck a bell when the dogs were fed. If the bell was sounded in close association with their meal, the dogs learnt to associate the sound of the bell with food. After a while, at the mere sound of the bell, they responded by drooling." Or you could just search on Pavlov and bell, and come up with a thousand such descriptions. Or go to textbooks of introductory psychology. There's a real mystery here. Why, when there is such an extraordinary poverty of evidence that Pavlov's work was fundamentally based on observing the salivary behaviour of a dog in response to a ringing bell, do people continue to believe this? That's the myth. Stephen -------------------------------------------- Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, Emeritus Bishop's University Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada e-mail: sblack at ubishops.ca --------------------------------------------- --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13251.645f86b5cec4da0a56ffea7a891720c9&n=T&l=tips&o=28160 or send a blank email to leave-28160-13251.645f86b5cec4da0a56ffea7a89172...@fsulist.frostburg.edu --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=28163 or send a blank email to leave-28163-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
