Abstract

Most conceptual models of the organization of the cardiovascular system begin with the premise that the nervous system regulates the metabolic and nonmetabolic reflex adjustments of the circulation. These models assume that all the neurally mediated responses of the circulation are reactive, i.e., reflexes elicited by adequate stimuli. This target article suggests that the responses of the circulation are conditional in three senses. First, as Sherrington argued, reflexes are conditional in that they never operate in a vacuum but in a context together with other reflexes. Guided by functional utility, they interact rather than add. Second, as Pavlov argued, stimuli acquire meanings as a result of experience. This notion of stimulus effect plus the Sherringtonian notion of conditionality suggest that association is one of the ways stimuli eliciting cardiovascular reflexes acquire their meanings and thus their relative strengths. Finally, as Skinner and others have argued, operants are responses that act upon the environment to obtain consequences – that is, stimuli. As operants, cardiovascular responses fulfill a major biological need, functioning proactively. The cardiovascular response is an integral component of the animal's behavior regardless of whether it is an elicited reflex or the eliciting stimulus acquired its properties as a result of the genetic inheritance of the animal or through experience, or the cardiovascular response is emitted in anticipation of an environmental consequence. The main theses of this essay are: (1) behavior is an integrated set of responses and the circulation is one of the response systems comprising behavior; (2) behavior is, in part, determined by its functional significance within a context; (3) the contextual factors operative at the time of the behavior have a major role in determining which of the set of possible responses will determine the final act, that is, which behavior will be the effective response and which other behaviors will be concomitants.