Hans Eysenck to understand the differences between introverts and extra verts

Another set of terms that comes from Pavlov are the first and second signal systems. The first signal system is where the conditioned stimulus (a bell) acts as a «signal* that an important event is to occur — i.e. the unconditioned stimulus (the meat). The second signal system is when arbitrary symbols come to stand for stimuli, as they do in human language.

Edward Lee Thorndike

Over in America, things were happening as well. Edward Lee Thorndike, although technically a functionalist, was setting the stage for an American version of Russian behaviorism. Thorndike (1874-1949) got his bachelors degree from Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1895 and his masters from Harvard in 1897.While there he took a class from William James and they became fast friends. He received a fellowship at Columbia, and got his PhD in 1898. He stayed to teach at Columbia until he retired in 1940.

He will always be remembered for his cats and his poorly constructed «puzzleboxes». These boxes had escape mechanisms of various complexities that required that the cats do several behaviors in sequence. From this research, he concluded that there were two «laws» of learning:

1. The law of exercise, which is basically the same as Aristotle's law of frequency. The more often an association (or neural connection) is used, the stronger the connection. Naturally, the less it is used, the weaker the connection. These two were referred to as the law of use and disuse respectively.

2. The law of effect. When an association is followed by a «satisfying state of affairs*, the connection is strengthened. And, likewise, when an association is followed by an unsatisfying state of affairs, it is weakened. Except for the «mentalistic» language («satisfying* is not behavioral), it is the same thing as Skinner's operant conditioning.

In 1929, his research led him to abandon all of the above except what we would now call reinforcement (the first half of law 2).

He is also known for his study of transfer of training. It was believed back then (and is still often believed) that studying difficult subjects —• even if you would never use them — was good for you because it «strengthened* your mind, sort of like exercise strengthens your muscles. It was used back then to justify making kids learn Latin, just like it is used today to justify making kids learn calculus. He found, however, that it was only the similarity of the second subject to the first that leads to improved learning in the second subject. So Latin may help you learn Italian, or algebra may help you learn calculus, but Latin won't help you learn calculus, or the other way around.

John Broadus Watson

John Watson was born January 9,1878 in a small town outside Greenville, South Carolina. He was brought up on a farm by a fundamentalist mother and a carousing father. When John was 12, they moved into the town of Greenville, but a year later his father left the family. John became a troublemaker and barely passed in school.

At 16, he began attending Furman University, also in Greenville, and he graduated at 22 with a Masters degree. He then went on to the University of Chicago to study under John Dewey. He found Dewey incomprehensible* and switched his interests from philosophy to psychology and neurophysiology. Dirt poor, he worked his way through graduate school by waiting tables, sweeping the psych lab, and feeding the rats.

In 1902 he suffered from a «nervous breakdown* which had been a long time coming. He had suffered from an intense fear of the dark since childhood — due to stories he had heard in childhood about the devil doing his work in the night — and this grew into depression.

Nevertheless, after some rest, he finished his PhD the following year, got an assistantship with his professor, the respected functionalist James Angell, and married a student in his intro psych class, Mary Ickes. They would go on to have two children. (The actress Mariette Hartley is his granddaughter.)