I.S. Beritashvili and Psychoneural Integration of Behavior

Ivane S. Beritashvili’s doctrine of psychoneural or goal-directed behavior was established in the late 1920s. It bears a strong resemblance to the concepts of purposive behavior and “cognitive maps” developed in parallel by Edward Tolman (1932), and significantly preceded respective modern concepts. Beritashvili’s research was motivated by a disagreement with Ivan P. Pavlov concerning the physiological bases of conditioned reflex formation. In the late 1920s, Beritashvili concluded that, due to the restrictions it placed on animals’ behavior, the Pavlov-Bechterev type of conditioning was not a proper model for the study of behavior. Instead, Beritashvili came to prefer the method of “free movement” of the experimental animal. He pursued ingenious and extensive comparative investigations of memory in vertebrates. This revealed the unique nature of mammalian memory processes, which he forthrightly called “image-driven” and distinguished from memory processes underlying conditional reflexes. These extraordinary works led to the discovery of the mediation of animal goal-directed behavior by image-driven memory.