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.

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    Moreover, our psychological study showed clearly to us that every mental function can really be developed. Apperception and observation, memory and imagination, attention and interest, imitation and reasoning, feeling and emotion, effort and will, in fact, every function can be rapidly strengthened through systematic training and can degenerate through neglect.” [Miinsterberg,’o9, p. 264] “There is still another class of what . . . can be . . . called formal elements. These are the general forms, not of our apprehension of the world, but of our conduct toward its situations. We know them commonly as the fundamentally desirable moral qualities, the components of good character. We can easily see that included among them are sympathy, kindliness, fearlessness, truthfulness, justice, courage. . . . They are desirable forms of our attitude toward the world, our reactions upon it.” [Delabarre, ’09, p. 593] “Training in any exercise that requires skill undoubtedly increases more general habits of accurate perception and methods of eliminating useless movements that are transfer- able to other movements with other parts of the body. So, too, with memory, in the usual logical learning the factors involved are in large measure common to memories of re- lated subjects. You cannot be sure that any fact is abso- lutely unrelated to any other, and so far as they are related, learning the one makes easier learning the other. In both rote and logical learning there are definite habits and capa- cities of attending to be acquired, and these may apparently be acquired in one field and used in another. We have to do in memory, then, with a large number of fairly distinct physiological capacities, but their use has become so depen- dent upon habits common to the different capacities that they are functionally parts of a common whole. Training one part thus trains related parts, and the whole in some degree. There is at present no means of saying how much training one memory receives through training another, nor is it pos- sible to say very exhaustively what memories are more closely, what more remotely related. Suffice it to say that memory for any range of facts will be trained more completely by practise in that field rather than in some other. . . . Never- theless the man with well-rounded training is probably on the average better trained for learning in any field than the
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