(Excerpt from Animal Intelligence: Experimental Studies
T...)
Excerpt from Animal Intelligence: Experimental Studies
The main purpose of this volume is to make accessible to students of psychology and biology the author's experimental studies of animal intellect and behavior. These studies have, I am informed by teachers of comparative psychology, a twofold interest. Since they represent the first deliberate and extended application of the experimental method in animal psychology, they are a useful introduction to the later literature of that subject. They mark the change from books of general argumentation on the basis of common experience interpreted in terms of the faculty psychology, to monographs reporting detailed and often highly technical experiments interpreted in terms of original and acquired connections between situation and response. Since they represent the point of view and the method of present animal psychology, but in the case of very general and simple problems, they are useful also as readings for students who need a general acquaintance with some sample of experimental work in this field.
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An Introduction to the Theory of Mental and Social Measurements (Classic Reprint)
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Excerpt from An Introduction to the Theory of Mental and Social Measurements
Experience has sufficiently shown that the facts of human nature can be made the material for quantitative science. The direct trans fer of methods originating in the physical sciences or in commercial arithmetic to sciences dealing with the complex and variable facts of human life has, however, resulted in crude and often fallacious meas urements. Moreover, it has been difficult to teach students to esti mate quantitative evidence properly or to obtain and use it wisely, because the books to which one could refer them were too abstract mathematically or too specialized, and omitted altogether much of the knowledge about mental measurements most needed by the majority of university students.
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The Measurement of Intelligence was written by Edward L. Thorndike. This is a 646 page book, containing 161097 words and 197 pictures. Search Inside is enabled for this title.
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(Professor Thorndike spen should need an introduction to t...)
Professor Thorndike spen should need an introduction to the public by another hand, I find no answer. Both as an experimental investigator, as a critic of other investigators, and as an expounder of results, he stands in the very forefront of American psychologists, and his references to my works in the text that follows will, I am sure, introduce me to more readers than I can introduce him to by my preface. In addition to the monographs which have been pouring from the press for twenty years past, we have by this time, both in English and in German, a very large number of general text-books, some larger and some smaller, but all covering the ground in ways which, so far as students go, are practical equivalents for each other. The main subdivisions, principles, and features of descriptive psychology are at present well made out. and writers are agreed about them. If one has read earlier books, one need not read the very newest one in order to catch up with the progress of the science. The differences in them are largely of order and emphasis, or of fondness on the authors parts for certain phrases, or for their own modes of approach to particular questions. It is one and the same body of facts with which they all make us acquainted.
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Educational Psychology: The Psychology Of Learning
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Edward Lee Thorndike was an American psychologist.
Background
Thorndike was born on August 31, 1874 in Williamsburg, Massachussets. He was the second son and second of four children of Edward Roberts Thorndike and Abby Brewster (Ladd) Thorndike. Both parents were natives of Maine, where the elder Edward Thorndike had first practiced law before embarking on a career as a Methodist clergyman in Massachusetts. The four children showed early signs of precocity, and all went on to subsequent careers in the scholarly world, Ashley and Mildred in English literature, Lynn in medieval history, and Edward in psychology.
Education
Thorndike attended various local elementary schools in Massachusetts--the family moved through the usual succession of pastorates-- and, after the age of twelve, the high schools of Lowell, Boston, and Providence (R. I. ).
He attended Wesleyan University in Connecticut from 1891 to 1895, where he did outstanding work in several subjects of the traditional classical curriculum and earned the B. A. but formed no firm career plans.
From Wesleyan he went to Harvard, initially to study English literature; there he earned his second B. A. in 1896 and the M. A in 1897 and decided to make psychology his lifework.
As recounted in an autobiographical sketch, Thorndike had neither heard nor seen the word "psychology" until his junior years at Wesleyan, when he took a required course in the subject with Andrew C. Armstrong. Neither the textbook, James Sully's Elements of Psychology, nor Armstrong's excellent lectures aroused much interest, and the course itself seemed to have had little impact. As a senior, Thorndike studied parts of William James's The Principles of Psychology in connection with a prize examination and found them more stimulating than any book he had ever read. The opportunity to take a course with James the following year fanned the fires of his nascent interest, and as he later wrote, "by the fall of 1897, I thought of myself as a student of psychology and a candidate for the Ph. D. degree".
Pioneering in the use of animals for psychological research, Thorndike began a number of experiments on instinctive and intelligent behavior in chickens, conducting them first in his own rooms and then in the basement of the James residence. ("The nuisance to Mrs. James, " he later reflected, "was, I hope, somewhat mitigated by the entertainment to the two youngest children, ").
In 1897-1898 a fellowship brought Thorndike to Columbia, where he worked primarily under James McKeen Cattell, a psychologist trained in Wilhelm Wundt's laboratory at Leipzig, and Franz Boas, an anthropologist who had studied at Heidelberg, Bonn, and Kiel; he derived from both a lifelong interest in the quantitative treatment of psychological data. He completed the work for the doctorate in 1898 with his thesis, "Animal Intelligence, " which inaugurated the scientific study of animal learning and at the same time laid the foundation for a dynamic psychology emphasizing stimulus-response connections (known as "S-R bonds") as the central factors in all learning.
He was awarded honorary degrees by Wesleyan (1919), Iowa (1923), Columbia (1929), Chicago (1932), Harvard (1934), Edinburgh (1936), and Athens (1937).
Career
When Thorndike and Pavlov began their research, comparative psychology used the so-called anecdotal method—collecting stories about animal behavior in natural and seminatural settings—in order to understand conscious animal thinking. Thorndike challenged the anecdotal method for lack of control, overestimation of animal intelligence, and tendencies to anthropomorphize the animal mind. He substituted experiments for anecdotes, establishing one of the two major paradigms for studying learning: instrumental, or operant, conditioning. Contemporaneously, Pavlov established Pavlovian, classical or respondent, conditioning. With regard to animal thought, Thorndike set out to catch the animal mind at work but concluded that animals do not reason their way to problem solutions. Rather, they engage in mindless trial-and-error learning.
In the experiments that defined instrumental conditioning, Thorndike placed young cats inside wooden cages called puzzle boxes from which they could escape by working a manipulandum inside the box, such as a foot treadle. Thorndike observed that cats tried out a variety of instinctive responses before accidentally hitting on the correct response. Nor did they show insight. Instead of stepping on the treadle immediately on the next trial, cats repeated erroneous responses, although the correct response emerged sooner as trials progressed until it became dominant. Thorndike described the process of learning as a gradual “stamping out” of connections between the box stimuli (S ) and the incorrect instinctive responses (R ), and the gradual “stamping in” of connections between S and the correct R. Hence, Thorndike called his theory of learning connectionism, a behavioral version of associationism.
Thorndike proposed three laws governing learning. The law of exercise held that using a connection strengthened it and disuse weakened it, while the law of readiness stated that when a connection was available, its use would be satisfying to the organism; these laws were later abandoned. Most important was the law of effect. Initially, the law of effect held that when a response to a stimulus led to pleasure, the S-R connection was strengthened, and when a response led to painful punishment, the connection was weakened. Thorndike later revised the law of effect, having found that punishment did not weaken S-R connections, but inhibited their expression, a view held today.
Because Thorndike never proposed a comprehensive system of psychology, his ideas were subjected to detailed rather than systematic criticism. Most significant were critiques of the law of effect and the methodology of the puzzle boxes. Eager to purge references to mental states from psychology, behaviorists objected to Thorndike’s reference to “pleasure”—a subjective conscious feeling—as the cause of learning. They substituted less mentalistic causes such as contiguity of stimulus and response (Edwin R. Guthrie 1886–1959) or biological drive reduction (Clark Hull 1884–1952), or they defined reinforcers functionally as events that strengthen the responses that produced them (B. F. Skinner 1904–1990). Later, as information-processing views of learning gained strength, psychologists questioned Thorndike’s law of effect in a new way (anticipated by Edward C. Tolman (1886–1959) in the 1930s). Thorndike assumed that rewards and punishments work via pleasure and pain, but they also provide information (a concept not available to Thorndike) that a response was correct or incorrect. Experiments that separate the two (e. g. , making a painful stimulus indicate that a response was correct) have shown that learning depends on the information value of reinforcers more than their subjective quality.
The Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler (1887– 1967) offered an important criticism of Thorndike’s puzzle-box method. One of the driving issues in psychology of learning is whether learning occurs gradually or can occur suddenly via insight. Thorndike found no signs of insight in his puzzle-box studies, while Köhler found evidence of insight in his studies of problem solving by chimpanzees. Köhler argued that Thorndike’s method was faulty because it made insight impossible: Trapped in the puzzle box, the cat could not see the connection between the manipulandum and the door opening, and so was forced to resort to trial and error. In Köhler’s experiments, on the other hand, all the elements needed to solve a problem were available to the subject, who was able to assemble them insightfully into a solution. The force of Köhler’s critique extends beyond issues of learning. Psychologists perform experiments in order to discover laws explaining behavior in real life, but experiments are necessarily artificial, and may lead psychologists to propose universal laws of behavior that are in fact laws induced by their experiments.
Nevertheless, Thorndike’s influence was enormous. He initiated the S-R concept of learning elaborated by Clark Hull and his followers from the 1930s to the 1960s, which overshadowed the cognitive tradition of the Gestalt psychologists and Edward Tolman, which held that learning consisted of developing internal representations of the world, the main view in cognitive science today. The law of effect provided the basis for Skinner’s principles of reinforcement, though Skinner did not view operant learning as making connections. There is today a new “connectionist” (neural network) movement, but it is not linkable to Thorndike.
aving enjoyed generally robust health throughout his life, Thorndike succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage at his home in Montrose, N. Y. , shortly before his seventy-fifth birthday. He was buried in Hillside Cemetery, Peekskill, N. Y.
Quotations:
"Colors fade, temples crumble, empires fall, but wise words endure. "
"Psychology is the science of the intellects, characters and behavior of animals including man. "
"Human education is concerned with certain changes in the intellects, characters and behavior of men, its problems being roughly included under these four topics: Aims, materials, means and methods. "
"Human beings are accustomed to think of intellect as the power of having and controlling ideas and of ability to learn as synonymous with ability to have ideas. But learning by having ideas is really one of the rare and isolated events in nature. "
"All that exists, exists in some amount and can be measured. "
"To the intelligent man with an interest in human nature it must often appear strange that so much of the energy of the scientific world has been spent on the study of the body and so little on the study of the mind. "
"He who learns and runs away, lives to learn another day. "
"Nowhere more truly than in his mental capacities is man a part of nature. "
"The intellectual evolution of the race consists in an increase in the number, delicacy, complexity, permanence and speed of formation of such associations. "
"The dog, on the other hand, has few or no ideas because his brain acts in coarse fashion and because there are few connections with each single process. "
"Whatever exists at all exists in some amount. To know it thoroughly involves knowing its quantity as well as its quality. "
"So the animal finally performs in that situation only the fitting act. "
"When, instead of merely associating some act with some situation in the animal way, we think the situation out, we have a set of particular feelings of its elements. "
"Dogs get lost hundreds of times and no one ever notices it or sends an account of it to a scientific magazine. "
"Psychology helps to measure the probability that an aim is attainable. "
Membership
Throughout his life, Thorndike was active in many scientific and scholarly associations, serving as president of the American Psychological Association (1912), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1934), the New York Academy of Sciences (1919 - 1920), and the American Association for Adult Education (1934 - 1935).
He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1917.
Personality
Energetic and efficient, he was highly productive.
Quotes from others about the person
"I knew of him, " Russell reminisced, "as a student who had made a study of the behavior of monkeys--a pretty good stepping-stone, it seemed to me, to a study of the nature and behavior of children. At that time neither the term nor the subject of educational psychology had been created; but I had a notion that a field of study so obviously fundamental to educational theory and practice should have both a name and a sponsor in the kind of teachers college which I was planning".
Florence L. Goodenough described him as "an ardent and tireless experimenter";
Robert S. Woodworth observed: "He was a rapid worker, quick to see the possibilities in a problem and select a first line of attack, willing to shift his attack as he got further into the problem, persistent in following up his leads, prompt in coming through with a published result" (Science, Mar. 10, 1950).
Connections
On August 29, 1900, Thorndike married Elizabeth Moulton of Boston; they had five children, four of whom lived to maturity and themselves followed scientific careers: Elizabeth Frances in mathematics, Edward Moulton in physics, Robert Ladd in educational psychology, and Alan Moulton in physics.