Ivan Petrovich Pavlov
Pavlov was born in Russia on September 25, 1849 and died on February 27, 1936. Pavlov, a predecessor of B.F. Skinner, began his work in physiology, rather than psychology. Psychology was a new field at the time and Pavlov played a role in it's development. While experimenting with dogs, Pavlov noticed that the dogs would salivate before they were fed. After the dogs were conditioned to eat at a certain time, Pavlov realized that the dogs would still salivate even if the food was not there. He called this "conditioned reflex" (Pavlov, 2013) B.F. Skinner's was similar to Pavlov in that he analyzed animals response to stimuli. The difference was that Pavlov was interested in the connection between the brain and the physical response, but Skinner believed that, " behaviorism accounts for the behavior of animals and human beings by observing physical responses to stimuli from outside the organism" (Skinner, 2013). Skinner was more interested in what could be observed on the outside. His focus was on the physical response and not the cognitive response.
John Broadus Watson
Watson was born in Greenville, South Carolina, on January 9th, 1878 and died on September 25, 1958 in New York City. HIs work was probably the most influential to B.F. Skinner. Watson is credited with being the "founder of the behaviorists school of psychology", and Skinner became a student of this area of psychology. "He [Watson] argued that psychology should be strictly limited to the objectively observable behavior and that behavior should only be discussed in terms of stimulus and response" (Watson, 2013). Skinner, like Watson, wasn't interested in what people or animals were thinking or feeling during the experiments. Their views were in contrast to Freudian views of psychology.
Edward Lee Thorndike
Thorndike was born on August 31, 1874 in Williamburg, Massachusetts, and died on August 9, 1949. Thorndike developed a "puzzle box" (2013) in which animals would have to pull a string or push a pedal in order to get food (Elliot) The animals slowly learned what they needed to do to get the food. Thorndike called this "trial-and-error behavior"(Elliot, 2013) Thorndike would later study human learning and would "devise tests to measure learning and aptitude" (Thorndike, 2006-2013). B.F. Skinner modeled some of his first animal behavior experiments off of those conducted by Thorndike. Skinner took it a step further by not only observing repeated problem solving behaviors, but by manipulating the stimuli to get a desired response. Thorndike and Skinner both applied their experiments to human education, but Thorndike in more of a practical sense. Thorndike aptitude tests and word books were more accepted than Skinner's Teaching Machine (2006-2013). Thorndike became more of an educational psychologist later in life, where Skinner applied his "operant conditioning" theory to many different areas of human society.