Most people have heard of Pavlov's dogs, even if they are not sure what he actually did. His work is more than a piece of trivia for dog owners. It explains a big part of how your dog learns, and we use it in every session.

Who was Ivan Pavlov?

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849 to 1936) was a Russian physiologist who spent most of his career in St. Petersburg. He was not trying to train dogs at all. He was studying digestion, and in 1904 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for that work. He was the first Russian to win a Nobel Prize.

While measuring how much saliva his dogs produced when food reached their mouths, he and his team noticed something odd. The dogs began to drool before any food arrived, at the sight of the person who fed them or the sounds that came before a meal. Pavlov realized this was not random. The dogs had learned it. He spent the next three decades studying how.

What his experiments showed

The basic setup was simple. Food in the mouth makes a dog salivate without any learning. That is a built-in reflex. Pavlov took a sound that meant nothing to the dog, such as a metronome, and played it just before giving food. After enough pairings, the sound alone made the dog salivate. A neutral signal had become a meaningful one. Today we call this classical conditioning.

He and his team went on to show several other things that matter to anyone training a dog:

  • Timing matters. The signal works best when it comes just before the food. In one of his lectures, a sound given after the food failed to become a signal even after hundreds of pairings.
  • Extinction. When the signal kept coming with no food after it, the drooling slowly faded.
  • Spontaneous recovery. After a rest, a faded response often came back on its own. The link had been pushed down, not erased.
  • Generalization. Once a dog learned one sound, similar sounds also got a response, just a weaker one.
  • Discrimination. When one sound was always followed by food and a similar sound never was, the dogs learned to tell them apart.

Did Pavlov really use a bell?

Mostly, no. The picture of Pavlov ringing a bell for a drooling dog is largely a popular retelling. His lab used many different signals, most often a metronome, along with buzzers, tones, lights and touch. Part of the bell story comes from translation. The Russian word he used for an electric buzzer was rendered as "bell" in an early English version of one of his lectures, and the image stuck. Some of his writing does mention an electric bell, so it is fair to say he may have used one now and then. It was just never the star of the show.

How we use it at Acadia Canine Academy

Every dog we train is learning through classical conditioning whether we plan for it or not, so we plan for it.

The marker word

Our marker is "yes". To a new puppy it is just a sound. We say it, then hand over food, again and again, until the word itself makes the dog brighten up. Just like Pavlov's metronome, the word comes first and the reward follows. From then on, "yes" can tell the dog the exact moment it got something right.

The e-collar

We introduce the e-collar the same way. The dog wears it during meals, play and training until it is just part of life. When we start using it, we work at the working level, the lowest level the dog notices and responds to, and pair it with commands the dog already knows, followed by a reward. The sensation comes to mean "listen, there is something good in this for you" rather than anything to fear.

The leash, the crate and the car

A leash that always comes before a walk becomes a happy signal. A crate paired with meals, chews and quiet time becomes a calm place. The flip side is just as real. A crate used only as punishment, or a car that only ever goes to the vet, teaches the wrong link. We pay attention to what comes before what.

Fading and coming back

Extinction and spontaneous recovery explain a lot of everyday frustration. If "yes" stops being followed by anything good, it slowly loses its meaning, so we keep paying it. And when an old habit seems to come back after weeks of good behaviour, that is often spontaneous recovery, not failure. Stay consistent and it fades again.

Similar but not the same

Generalization and discrimination are why we ask owners to keep their words consistent. If "no" and "go" sound alike to your dog, or different family members use different words for the same thing, the dog has to guess. Our release word is "okay", but you can choose your own words as long as everyone uses the same ones every time.

Keep reading

Classical conditioning is half the picture. The other half is learning by consequences, which we explain in our four quadrants article. For the bigger picture, read How Dogs Think, Learn and Communicate.