When he and Stefan Miller were medical students in Warsaw they proposed another type of conditioned reflex in addition to that discovered by Pavlov which was under the control of reward.

With Konorski's knowledge of neurophysiology greatly expanded through his collaboration with Lubinska, he turned his attention to the neural mechanisms that underlie conditioning.

He was the author of two important books on learning, Conditioned Reflexes and Neuron Organization (1948), and Integrative Activity of the Brain (1967).

In the second, he substantially revised his early theories and synthesised work on associative learning and neurobiology of perception and motivation.

Konorski managed to escape to the Soviet Union where he was appointed the head of the primate laboratory at Sukhumi on the Black Sea in Georgia.

Then in 1949, during the peak of Stalinism, at a conference in Leningrad commemorating the 100th anniversary of Pavlov's birth, his book was condemned and rejected.

Since his death his influence has grown considerably and now recognized as the first to systematically investigate the mechanisms underlying instrumental conditioning.