ABSTRACT
The notion of an orienting or “what-is-it” response (OR) emerged from Pavlov’s (1927) studies of classical conditioning in dogs. Pavlov observed that a dog’s conditioned response to a stimulus would fail to appear if some unexpected event occurred:
It is the reflex [OR] which brings about the immediate response in men and animals to the slightest changes in the world around them, so that they immediately orientate their appropriate receptor organ in accordance with the perceptible quality in the agent bringing about the change, making a full investigation of it. The biological significance of this reflex is obvious, (p. 12)
