Pavlov's cigarette
Pavlov is often claimed as a genius for discovering the effect of associative intelligence in his famous experiment "Pavlov's dog". In that experiment Pavlov discovered that a dog salivates when it is given its food, and that if a bell is rang whilst the dog is given its food, it can associate the two events. This was the conclusion he reached when ringing the bell and not giving the dog any food, it still salivated.
There is however a dark secret to Pavlov's discovery. Aliens were in fact testing Pavlov with both the experiment and a cigarette. To begin with Pavlov tested other creatures such as a cat, a lab rat and a guinea pig. Little did he know though, that guinea pig was in fact an alien from the plant Akha. The Akhan didn't like to have it's associative intelligence tested and so replaced Pavlov's cigarette pack with one that it had made earlier. These cigarettes were an experiment to see if humans had associative intelligence. Basically every time Pavlov smoked one of these cigarettes his experiment would be more succesful because the Akhan had replaced his dog with an Akhan dog that is highly sentient and could sneak off and get its own food, ring the bell and integrate the log of x by dx with its paws tied behind its back. What the alien did not suspect however was that Pavlov was in fact trying to impress a young lady and thus was trying to give up smoking. As his frustration grew at the failure of his experiment and hence his hypothesis, Pavlov one day in fit of pique killed all of the lab animals! Thus the Akhan's field research into human intelligence never returned to the homeworld and to this day Akhans regard Earth as home to a barbaric race and they never visit. When Pavlov returned to his experiment with a new dog things went well and the great scientific discovery was made.