L3: Comparative Psychology and Early Behaviorism Flashcards
What were three of Conwy Lloyd Morgan’s criticisms of Romanes?
- confused objective (testable) with subjective (non-testable) evidence
- accepted complex explanations for a behaviour (e.g. mechanical reasoning) when a simpler one (e.g. trial-and-error learning) would suffice
- using one-off observations rather than longer term observation of how a behaviour was acquired
What is Morgan’s Canon?
Similar to Ockham’s razor. A behaviour can’t be explained as the outcome of a higher mental faculty when a “lower” one would suffice.
How did Morgan justify his Canon?
Evolutionary theory. If a behaviour could be produced by simple mental processes, there would be no selection pressure for more complex processes to evolve.
What analogy did Morgan draw to explain how simple mental processes could interact with the environment to produce complex behaviour?
He compared it to how a simple, unconscious process like natural selection could interact with the environment to produce highly complex adaptations.
What significant shift did Thorndike’s work mark?
A shift from the British thinkers who work from the theoretical stand point of evolution, to the American behaviorists who focused on experimental testing of their ideas.
What experimental paradigm did Thorndike use?
Cats and dogs were placed into puzzle boxes, which they had to escape in order to obtain food.
Why were early comparative psychologists interested in cross-species comparisons, and what did Thorndike find?
It was thought that differences between species would reflect incremental evolutionary changes. Thorndike found no evidence of difference between cats and dogs.
How did Thorndike test learning by imitation, and what were his results?
Thorndike would allow a cat or dog to observe its fellow escaping from a puzzle box. He found no evidence that the observing animal could escape the box more quickly.
Summarise Thorndike’s law of effect.
Different responses can be made to situation. The one that is followed by satisfaction to the animal will become “more firmly connected” to the situation and more likely to occur in response to it.
According to S-R theory or connectionism, what is learnt during conditioning?
The S-R connection is strengthened or stamped in by appetitive outcomes.
Does connectionism predict that associations are learnt during conditioning?
No, only the S-R connection is strengthened. S-S associations are not. Neither are R-> consequence associations.
Why did Watson favour anti-mentalism?
He believed that psychology must focus on public, measurable events like behaviour in order to be objective and scientific, rather than private events like mental states.
What did Watson’s experiments with Baby Albert show?
That human infants displayed conditioned emotional responses, such as phobias, and that these could be generalised to stimuli that shared similar features to the CS.
