do you agree with E.L. Thorndike's observation about learning? (read details)?

Question

E.L.Thorndike, from his experiment on cats maintained that learning is nothing but stamping in of the correct responses and stamping out of the incorrect responses through trial and error.

Answer 1

Well, as I recall, Thorndike's puzzle box experiments involved putting a cat in a box that had several "activities" such as a rope to pull, a lever to step on, a spinner to twirl...all things that a cat could easily do. The cat was placed in the box and left there until it could get out. Getting out was the "reward" for the cat.

I feel that the experiments were "flawed" on a couple of levels, but still had useful relevance. First of all, escaping a box is an avoidance behavior for a cat (cats have natural instincts where they do not enjoy being confined). Therefore the learning was not based on positive reinforcement, which would have affected the learning curve.

Secondly, it is now recognized that different animals have different natural benefits to their learning abilities (such as the rat's ability to "internally map" an area, or a pigeon's ability to distinguish color cues) and I'm not convinced Thorndike took this into consideration when designing his experiment.

His cats would engage in lots of fruitless behaviors when put in the box, including just yowling loudly or giving up and going to sleep, but once they "discovered" the lever that freed them response time for their entry and exit of the box was almost instantaneous.

So continuing my critique, For one thing, I fail to understand how he was able to generate enough data to show any sort of learning curve. His data would have simply been a list of incorrect responses, a time, then a list of correct responses. That's not valid data.

Secondly, because of the fact that there was no shaping to the behavior, it would be hard to gauge exactly what he was measuring in the first place. How many instances of his time records were thrown off because of results of learned helplessness/hopelessness? This means that his data was not robust.

So if his data was not valid, and it wasn't robust, then what do his findings mean? Whenever this is the case, I have found, it is simply someone trying to apply an explanation to the data they received. I feel, personally, that if he had designed some more control experiments and then some isolated follow-up experiments he could have shown his theories were more sound. I don't believe he did this adequately, but I still (like I said earlier) believe he generated some useful information.

Answer 2

Recent studies in neurology and cognitive psychology suggest that old responses are not lost, so therefore they are not unlearned. Old responses that are no longer useful are merely replaced by new responses and, perhaps, stimulus-response patterns. Learned material appears to be encoded in the brain in the form of engrams. New learning is merely causing adjustments in these engrams such that different responses take place. Thorndike's work was novel and insightful for its day. He was trying to prove that things were not merely the way learning theorists believed it was, but that there were certain unexplained things that happened in learning that suggested problem solving and strategic behavior, not just stimulus-response with considerations for motivation, incentive, etc such as Hull, Spence, and Cattell were proposing. This type of research eventually led to Kendler and Kendler .

Answer 3

well if E.L. Thorndike said it, it must be true!

however, since cats or animals can't communicate in speech as humans do - humans are more complex creatures and so with that in mind, his observations are too simplistic....

but that's just one of my observationalisms on the learning experiences...

take care anyway, eh?!

;-)