Edward Tolman, a behaviorist, conducted an experiment with ...



Edward Tolman, a behaviorist, conducted an experiment with rats in 1938.  He placed three groups of rats in a maze and observed how they behaved over a two week period.  Group 1 always received a food reward when they reached the end of the maze in a timely manner and would not go down to the dead end portions of the maze.  The rats in Group 2 never received a food reward and seemed like they followed no particular path, as if they were just wandering around.  The rats in Group 3, however, were a very interesting group.  For the first ten days of the experiment, they seemed to wander around like the rats in Group 2 and found no food.  However, on the eleventh day, Tolman placed food in the maze and it appeared that they had learned to go to the end of the maze without any reinforcement but never desired to.  On the twelfth day, the rats from Group 3 were doing as well as the rats from Group 1, which had been rewarded with food from the very beginning of the test.  It appears that the rats from Group 3 used latent learning since they did not immediately display the same performance as the rats in Group 1.

[pic]

This idea that rats don’t just learn movements for only rewards but instead learn even when there are no rewards suggests a latent learning theory. Again, by using a rat to run a maze, he could show how this latent learning was possible. The setup would be three different groups with as a control that would start with food automatically. Another second experimental group would not get food until the 7th day. Finally, another third experimental group would not get the food until the 3rd day. Surprisingly, in the two experimental groups, once food was given at the goal point, the rats began to improve their routes after the reward was introduced. After they were fed, the rat began to run the maze better on the next trial, showing that even though there was no reward the rat was still making a cognitive map of the maze. This was evident when the reward was introduced. Tolman coined this phenomenon, “latent learning” and said that this experiment could be extended to humans and that we too use latent learning everyday.

1. How did the results of Tolman’s experiment differ from those of Skinner and Pavlov?

2. How would Skinner and Pavlov defend their theory?

Cognitive Psychology

The term cognitive psychology came into use with the publication of the book Cognitive Psychology by Ulric Neisser in 1967. Cognitive Psychology revolves around the notion that if we want to know what makes people tick then the way to do it is to figure out what processes are actually going on in their minds.

Cognition literally means “knowing”. In other words, psychologists from this approach study cognition which is ‘the mental act or process by which knowledge is acquired.’

They focus on the way humans process information, looking at how we treat information that comes in to the person (what behaviourists would call stimuli) and how this treatment leads to responses. In other words, they are interested in the variables that mediate between stimulus/input and response/output. The main areas of study in cognitive psychology are: perception, attention, memory and language.

Behavioral vs. Cognitive Views  of Learning 

Behaviorism (“learns to”) 

1.  Learning involves the formation of associations between specific actions and specific events (stimuli) in the environment.  These stimuli may either precede or follow the action (antecedents vs. consequences). 

2.  Many behaviorists use intervening variables to explain behavior (e.g., habit, drive) but avoid references to mental states. 

3.  RADICAL BEHAVIORISM (operant conditioning/behavior modification/behavior analysis): avoids any intervening variables and focuses on descriptions of relationships between behavior and environment (“functional analysis”).

 

 

 

 

 

Behavioral vs. Cognitive Views  of Learning 

  Cognitivism (“learns that”) 

1.  Learning takes place in the mind, not in behavior.  It involves the formation of mental representations of the elements of a task and the discovery of how these elements are related. 

2.  Behavior is used to make inferences about mental states but is not of interest in itself (“methodological behaviorism”).  

3.  EXAMPLE:  Tolman & Honzik’s experiment on latent learning.  Tolman, , argued that when rats practice mazes, they acquire a “cognitive map” of the layout—mental representations of the landmarks and their spatial relationships.

3. Should Tolman be considered a cognitive psychologist or a behaviorist? Explain

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download