The psychology of learning / by Edward L. Thorndike.

  • Edward Thorndike
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The psychology of learning / by Edward L. Thorndike. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

    31/476 page 13
    The second of the five subsidiary principles is what we may call the law of the learner’s Set or Attitude or Adjust- ment or Determination. The learning cannot be described adequately in a simple equation involving the pen and a chick taken abstractly. The chick, according to his age, hunger, vitality, sleepiness and the like, may be in one or another attitude toward the external situation. A sleepier and less hungry chick will, as a rule, be ‘set’ less toward escape-move- ments when confined; its neurones involved in roaming, per- ceiving companions and feeding will be less ready to act; it will not, in popular language, ‘try so hard to’ get out or ‘care so much about’ being out. As Woodworth says in com- menting upon similar cases of animal learning: “In the first place we must assume in the animal an adjustment or determination of the psycho-physical mechanism toward a certain end. The animal desires, as we like to say, to get out and to reach the food. Whatever be his con- sciousness, his behavior shows that he is, as an organism, set in that direction. This adjustment persists till the motor reaction is consummated; it is the driving force in ^he unre- mitting efforts of the animal to attain the desired end. His reactions are, therefore, the joint result of the adjustment and of stimuli from various features of the cage. Each single reaction tends to become associated with the adjustment.” [Ladd and Woodworth, Ti, p. 551.] The principle that in any external situation, the responses made are the product of the ‘set’ or ‘attitude’ of the animal, that the satisfyingness or annoyingness produced by a response is conditioned by that attitude, and that the ‘successful’ response is by the law of effect connected with that attitude as well as with the external situation per sc—is general. Any process of learning is conditioned by the mind’s ‘set’ at the time. Animal learning shows also the fact, which becomes of tremendous moment in human learning, that one or another element of the situation may be prepotent in determining the response. For example, the cats with which I experimented, would, after a time, be determined by my behavior more than I
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3