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Maze Learning In Adults

He became adept at training rats to open a puzzle-box like Thorndikes" for a small food reward. He also studied maze learning but simplified the task. One of his mazes was simply a long straight alley with food at the end. Watson found that once the animal was trained at running this "maze" it almost did it automatically. When he made it shorter the rats ran straight into the end wall. This was known as the kerplunk experiment. Watson's theoretical position was more extreme than Thorndike's - he would have no room for mentalistic concepts like pleasure or distress in his explanations of behaviour. He essentially rejected Thorndike's law of effect stating all that was important was the frequency of occurrence of stimulus-response pairings. .
             In 1938 Burrhus Skinner published what was arguably the most influential work on animal behaviour of that century, "The Behaviour of Organisms". He believed that if the rats could not see stimuli outside the maze they did not make the appropriate choices when it was blocked. This suggested that they may have learned many stimulus-response associations in different parts of the maze, perhaps in sequence rather than internalising the map of it. His "Skinner-box" was a great improvement on the individual learning trials of Watson and Thorndike. Skinner developed the basic concept of "Operant Conditioning" claiming that this type of learning was not the result of stimulus-response learning - for Skinner the basic association in operant conditioning was between the operant response and the reinforcer, the discriminative stimulus served to signal when this association would be acted upon. .
             I decided to conduct an experiment using some of the information that I gathered from the previous studies of maze learning in rats but using human adults instead of rats. I wanted to test Thorndike's hypothesis that when the animal learns to perform the action repeatedly it becomes accustomed and learns the way out of the box.


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