[I.S. Beritashvili (Beritov) is one of the founders of the modern biobehavioral science (to the 120th anniversary)].

Ivan Solomonovich Beritashvili (Beritov) is one of the great Russian physiologists who have created the Russian route of the modern science of behavior. He has proposed and experimentally substantiated a concept of psychoneural activity according to which the behavior controlled by images is the main and higher form of the behavior of vertebrates. Behaviors on the basis of conditioned reflexes and images are qualitatively different activities underlain by different neural substrates. Recently, the Beritashvili's principle ideas have been confirmed by multiple experimental studies of the animal and human cognitive behavior. At present, the concept of the procedural memory formed by training and acquisition and episodic memory formed on the basis of images is commonly accepted. The episodic memory stores the environmental events and phenomena perceived by an animal or a human. Each time when the image is reproduced during perception of environment or its part, an animal performs the same behavioral act as during the actual perception. Beritashvili's viewpoint that the procedural and declarative memories are controlled by different brain structures has been confirmed by experiments.