Pavlov’s Dogs - Classical Conditioning

In Girl in the Glass, James shouts as the Epistloth:

“Hello, little girl. Girl in the Glass, where are you? Can you help us out?” 

Declan isn’t surprised when she doesn’t respond, explaining:

“She’s not Pavlov’s dog.”

What Declan is saying, in his professorial way, is that interacting with the Girl in the Glass requires a bit more finesse.

Pavlov’s dogs is a reference to  Pavlovian conditioning, also known as classical conditioning, where a stimulus prompts a conditioned response. This behavior was discovered accidentally by Ivan Petrovich Pavlov during the 1890s, when he used dogs to research the salivation response to being fed. He inserted a small test tube into the cheek of each dog to measure their saliva production when fed.

He predicted dogs would salivate in response to the food in front of them, but he also noticed the dogs began to salivate whenever they heard sounds of the food being delivered. Pavlov realized he could train the dogs to associate other objects or events with food, triggering the same salivatory response as seeing the food.

This scientific discovery is known as Pavlovian, or classical, conditioning, and formed the basis for understanding how animals (including humans) learn through association.

The dogs learned to associate the ringing bell with food, no longer needing to see food before salivating