Pavlov’s great scientific achievement was to objectively and experimentally investigate these laws. Critically, Pavlov did not study salivation in dogs because he believed associative learning to be an inherently primitive process applicable only to mechanical reactions in animals. Rather, he saw the potential for such learning to be part of a broad range of adaptive human actions. Pavlov simply studied the response system he knew best; indeed, he earned the Nobel Prize in 1904 for his work in digestive physiology.
