Classical Behaviourism

Being placed in a title, “Classical” maybe provokes readers to jump to another, at least, “neo-classic” pieces of scientific history. But for me, these are not badly-digestive clinkers of antiquity. Methods of classical behaviourism are rather quick than dead nowadays.

About 1900, Ivan Pavlov, at that time Director of the physiological department of the Institute of Experimental Medicine in St. Petersburg, devised a new method of investigating the physiology of the nervous system in its relations to the psychic reactions of organisms. This method, which later became widely known as the Pavlov salivary reflex method, firstly was employed not for the study of psychic phenomena, but simply as a mean of approach to the physiology of the nervous system. The history of development of Pavlov’s simple, elegant experimental paradigm for studying learning in animals is interesting and dramatic.

Pavlov was born in 1849 at Ryazan, in a small village in Central Russia, where his father was a village priest. He was educated first at the Ryazan Ecclesiastical High School and then at the theological seminary there. Inspired by the progressive ideas which D. I. Pisarev, the most eminent of the Russian literary critics of the 1860's and I. M. Sechenov, the father of Russian physiology, were spreading, Pavlov abandoned his religious career and left the seminary for the University of St. Petersburg. There he studied chemistry and physiology, and received his doctorate in 1879. After earlier studies in Russia, he went to Germany for graduate work under the direction of the cardiovascular physiologist Carl Ludwig and the gastrointestinal physiologist Rudolf Heidenhain.

Pavlov was looking at the digestive processes in dogs, especially the interaction between salivation and the action of the stomach. He realised they were closely linked by reflexes in the autonomic nervous system. Without salivation, the stomach didn't get the message to start digesting. Pavlov wanted to see if external stimuli could affect this process, so he rang a bell at the same time he gave the experimental dogs food. After a while, the dogs - which before only salivated when they saw and ate their food - would begin to salivate when the bell rang, even if no food were present. Moreover, around mealtime, as soon as his dogs saw or heard the lab assistant who fed them, they began salivating and secreting gastric juices, even before he actually gave them their chow.

Pavlov suggested that an animal had formed an association between a previously neutral stimulus and a previously unconditional (unlearned) response. As part of his research on salivation, the physiologist invented an apparatus to enable him to measure precisely the amount of saliva a dog produces. He gave it food, in order to make the dog salivate. Being placed in the Pavlov’s apparatus the animal was lack a possibility to act somehow actively in response to stimuli; the dog’s whole business was to drool.

Pavlov carried out many controlled laboratory experiments and established a theory of classical (or Pavlovian) conditioning. The basic idea was to use the salivary secretion as a quantitative measure of the psychical or subjective activity of the animal. It was a new tool for objective study of subjective psychic processes. In essence, Pavlov distilled the complexity of learned behaviour down to one elemental component, a conditional reflex: a change in behaviour produced by the association of two stimuli in time (for instance, bell ring and food). Throughout the rest of 1900s, behavioural properties of Pavlovian learning were quantified and compared across the animal kingdom. Pavlov considered the conditional reflex as a cue to the mechanism of the most highly developed forms of reaction in animals and humans to their environment.

Indeed, Pavlov was neither the first nor the last behaviourist tempted by an idea of discovering the fundamental way that all organisms, humans as well as animals, learn. In his model, all non-innate behaviour is a conditional response. He told of ambition as a sort of conditional response - " the reflex to purpose, " he called it (Pavlov, 1927, 1928). He even believed that there is an innate " reflex of selfdom, " which leads the weak to be servile to their oppressors. " I am convinced profoundly, once and for all, " Pavlov proclaimed, " that it is by following this road that human intelligence will triumph over the most important of the problems it has been solving - namely, the knowledge of the laws and mechanisms of human nature." Pavlov announced principles of the language function in the human as based on long chains of conditional reflexes involving words. The function of language involves not only words, he held, but an elaboration of abstractions and generalisations is not possible in animals lower than the human.

At the 14th International Medical Congress in Madrid (1903), Pavlov read a paper on “The Experimental Psychology and Psychopathology of Animals”, and in 1906 he gave a lecture in London. Enlarged reviews of his papers were published in European languages. Influential American behaviourists, such as R. Yerkes (Yerkes and Morgulis, 1909) and J. B. Watson (1916) published articles that ranked Pavlov’s new method as one of the most significant in the development of behaviourism.

Since 20-s, in communist Russia, science has had to develop behind “iron curtain”. Pavlov, the first Nobel Prize winner in the theoretical medicine, was too well known to isolate him, so the government used his name as a peculiar talisman. Pavlov was one in a thousand among Soviet scientists who was allowed to go abroad. In 20-s Pavlov visited US twice, being hosted by his close colleague Walter Cannon, the father of conception of homeostasis and the author of “The Wisdom of the Body” (1932). Cannon wrote a foreword for English edition of Pavlov’s “Conditioned Reflexes” (1927). The Soviet Union became a prominent centre for the study of physiology, and the fact that the 15th International Physiological Congress in 1935 was held in Leningrad and Moscow clearly shows that it was acknowledged as such.

Pavlov Institute of Physiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences was founded in 1925. The Institute is partially located in St. Petersburg, but its main part is located 10 kilometers from St. Petersburg, at a bucolic town of Koltushi. This research campus founded in the early 1930-s. Now it bears Pavlov’s name and is rightfully recognised as " the capital of conditional reflexes". Pavlov erected a monument to a generalised “Pavlovian Dog” just near the famous “Tower of Silence” were experiments were carried out under isolation from noisy environment. When Pavlov was still alive, Koltushi was visited by such world leaders in science and culture as F.Hill, L.Lapique, D.Barcroft, W.Cannon, H.Hunt, Herbert Wells, Niels Bohr. In 1993, on the basis of the Institute, Pavlov International Research Center was founded. The Pavlovial Society was established in 1955 by W. Horsley Gantt at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, USA, and the Pavlovian Laboratory at the School of Medicine is actively working.

About the same time that Pavlov was conducting his first experiments, Thorndike formulated the theory of instrumental conditioning in Columbia, USA. The Thorndike’s method was based on observations on animals’ (usually cats’) trial-and-error learning to escape from puzzle-boxes to obtain food. Being placed in a puzzle-box, the cat would be able to see a feeder outside and this was its incentive to escape. Inside the puzzle-box Thorndike had rigged up a number of devices that, if pulled or pushed, would lead to the door being opened. Initially the cat would scratch and struggle widely in the box, and a considerable time elapsed before it responded correctly. Having made the response, the cat was allowed a few moments of access to food before being returned to the box for another trial. It turned out that the time, or latency, to escape decreased over trials. For example, trying to get freedom, the cat, by pure accident, performed the correct response - perhaps by knocking the lever- and was able to escape. As a consequence of this the animal gained freedom and the food, thus positively reinforcing the lever-knocking behaviour. After a number of trials the cat eventually learns to connect the knocking on the lever with escape. Thus, being placed back in the box, it goes straight to the lever, knocks it, and escapes. Therefore, according to Thorndike, the cat has now developed a connection between knocking the lever and positive consequences.

Thorndike can be considered one of the first true connectionists. In his book, The Fundamentals of Learning (1932) he differentiated between the principles of British associationism and what he had introduced “new connectionism.'' His most important contributions to psychology is summarised in Selected Writings from a Connectionist's Psychology (Thorndike, 1949).

While Thorndike was engaged in research with his animals at Columbia, two young men, Linus Ward Kline and Willard Stanton Small were working in the Psychology Laboratory at Clark University. At that time, the Clark laboratory was under the direction of Edmund Clark Sanford, one of the great pioneers in the development of experimental laboratory technique (remember, that it was Sanford who suggested to use the diagram of Hampton-Court Maze). Like Thorndike, Kline and Small had been inspired by Morgan's “Habit and Instinct”. Under the guidance of Sanford, Kline (1899) constructed several pieces of laboratory apparatus for the study of the behaviour of vorticella, wasps, chicks, and white rats. Indeed, one of these pieces, designed with the assistance of Small, approximated a simple Y-maze. This may be considered a “Gestalt germ” in the heart of behaviouristic movement, that Kline criticised Thorndike's over reliance on a purely experimental method, argued for a combination of the naturalistic and experimental approaches. While Kline involved himself in comparative studies, Small focused exclusively on the rat (Small, 1900, 1901). In studying the behaviour of rats in a maze, Small unwittingly introduced a technique into psychology that became so widespread during the heyday of behaviourism that it came for many to symbolise the science itself.

As it was mentioned before, it is Watson with whom affiliation ties behaviourism as the school of psychology in which behaviour is described in terms of physiological responses to stimuli. The famous American psychologist, while a doctoral student with James R. Angell at the University of Chicago, carried out animal research in maze learning. He considered maze problems a form of instrumental conditioning in which the animal is faced with a sequence of alternatives. Being one of the first experimentalists who carried out animal maze learning in details, Watson at the same time conducted a series of ethological studies of sea birds doing research on the relationship between sensory input and learning and bird behaviour. He studied all aspects of the birds' behaviour: imprinting, homing, mating and nesting habits, feeding, and chick-rearing. These extensive studies, carried out over four years, are some of the earliest examples of what would later be called “ethology” and his comprehensive records of the birds' behaviour were some of the earliest examples of an " ethogram" - a comprehensive record of the naturally occurring behaviour of an organism (for details see: Wozniak, 1997; Buckley, 1982; Coon, 1994; Rilling, 2000).

Jacques Loeb, who had come to Chicago from Germany, developed some new approaches of experimental physiology (for details see: Pauly, 1987; Wozniak, 1997). Being by that time the author of “Comparative Physiology of the Brain and Comparative Psychology” (1900), Loeb, together with Dewey, Angell, and Donaldson, led Watson, then PhD student, to a highly descriptive, objective approach to the analysis of behaviour that he would later call " behaviourism." Dealing mainly with insects, Loeb was working on the general mechanisms by which animal behaviour is controlled, and conceived of animal behaviour as a response of the whole organism. For Loeb there was no principled distinction between reflex movement, tropism, and instinct. He considered " Reflex” the term used when reaction to an external stimulus involves only a part of the organism, tropisms are reactions of the organism as a whole, and instincts are more complicated reactions composed of tropisms and reflex chains. Regardless of whether the animal's behaviour is reflexive, tropistic, or instinctive, it consists of a reaction - usually purposive and coordinated -to an external stimulus. Loeb studied animal activity, holding to the idea of consciousness as associative memory or capacity of the animal to learn from experience. In Chicago Loeb studied learning abilities of brain-damaged dogs and he was full of enthusiasm for the application of physiology and biochemistry to the problems of associative memory. Watson was duly impressed, both with what he read and heard and by what he saw in Loeb's laboratory.

In 1907 Watson was hired by Johns Hopkins University as a full professor of psychology. Very soon he became director of the psychological laboratory and the editor of “Psychological Review”.

At the early stage of his career as psychologist, Watson had been particularly influenced by the reflex studies of Ivan M. Sechenov and Vladimir Bekhterev (see Chapter 3). He apparently did not become interested in the conditioning of motor and autonomic responses until late 1914, when he read a French edition of Bekhterev's Objective Psychology(see Hilgard and Marquis, 1940).

Among Watson’s papers and books, the most influential was “Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist” (1919), the first textbook to extend behaviouristic analysis to human psychological function. Watson believed in a stimulus-response method for predicting and controlling behaviour. His methods, however, differed from those of Pavlov in that he did not use the terms “stimulus” and “response” in as narrow a sense as the Russian physiologists did. For him, a stimulus could be a general environmental situation or some internal condition of the organism. He even dealt with language and thought, maintaining that speech was a form of behaviour and that thought was a form of illicit (covert) behaviour. He was able to explain thought in this manner by stating that thinking is accompanied by minute manipulations of the tongue and throat muscles. Thus, thought for Watson was nothing more than implicit speech - tiny movements of the larynx that take place during the problem-solving (Watson, 1913). It is worth to note that another article on subvocal speech by Wyczoikowska (1913) was to appear in the same issue of the " Psychological Review." The theory of thinking as subvocal speech was not original to these authors. Gurtis (1900) had attempted to measure movements of the larynx during thinking.

In 1920 Watson published, in co-authoring with Rosalie Rayner, a paper known as “The little Albert study” which still belongs to one of the most frequently cited psychological publications (Watson and Rayner, 1920). Albert B. was born to a woman who was a wet nurse in the Harriet Lane Home for Invalid Children. Although raised in the hospital environment, Albert developed normally and was emotionally healthy and stable. Before the start of the experiment, when Albert was 9 months old, Watson and Rayner ran Little Albert through emotional tests. The infant was confronted briefly and for the first time with a white rat, a rabbit, a dog, masks with and without hair, etc. The infant at no time showed any fear. The actual experiment began when the infant was 11 months old. Watson had exposed Albert to a loud sound (made by a bar being banged right behind Albert's head) while being presented with a white rat. A week after, after a series of testing, Albert was able to cry by only being presented with the rat. Five days later, Albert showed generalization by reacting with fear to a dog, a fur coat, Watson's hair, cotton wool, and a Santa Claus mask with a white beard (perhaps today the experiment would be considered unethical). During the whole experiment, Albert was happy to play with wooden toys at any time. This result was for Watson proof that complex behaviour develops by conditioning out of simple unlearned responses and confirmed him in the idea that Behaviourism should apply the techniques of animal research or conditioning to humans. Later Watson (1928) published a book “Psychological Care of Infant and Child”. In it he encouraged parents to approach childrearing as a professional application of behaviourism and advocated strict routines and tight control over the child's environment and behaviour.

Being at Johns Hopkins University Watson began to look beyond academia for opportunities in the application area. He offered a course on the " Psychology of Advertising" in which he instructed future managers in the importance of applied psychology (for details see: Petty et al., 1983). While working in advertising industry (1920-1935), Watson revealed that marketing goods depends not upon an appeal to reason but upon emotional conditioning and stimulation of desire. He compared a customer with a green frog and thus considered the marketplace as a laboratory for the advertising industry, where a consumer was akin to the experimental subject whose behaviour should be deliberately controlled. Elaborating practical rules for advertisement, Watson stressed three common features: evoking emotion rather than cognition, providing specific instructions for using the product, and employing direct testimonials.

The widely known Aldous Huxley’s novel “The Brave New World”

(1931) was based on the direct allusion to conditioning of human behaviour and Watson’s principles of advertisement. A famous English writer Aldous Leonard Huxley was born into a family that was closely tied with development of science and art. In particular, Aldous' father was the son of Thomas Henry Huxley, a great biologist who helped develop the Darwin’s theory of evolution. In Huxley’s dystopia Brave New World, universal human happiness has been achieved by means of control of reproduction, genetic engineering and conditioning. Each class, from the super- intelligent Alpha Pluses down to the dwarfed semi-moron Epsilons is conditioned to love its type of work and its place in society. Each factory-produced group of clones is shaped in the Centre of Hatcheries and Conditioning. Toddlers are trained to associate flowers and books with electric shocks.

It is clear for us why behaviouristic ideas made a protest in humanistic writers like Huxley. However, as we will see further in this book, these ideas still underlie many modern methods of studying intelligence. Besides, some behaviouristic data contain germs of new ideas and interpretations. For instance, one of the reasons that “The little Albert study” is so well known is that it is rediscovered every 5 or 10 years by a new group of psychologists (Harris, 1979). In particular, Seligman who seized control of the Albert story and used it to attack traditional theories of learning, devoted his attention, in particular, to those facts that the infant had formed fear reactions to certain stimuli much more readily than to other ones; he generalised stimuli but his conditioned reactions were hard to extinguish (see description of these properties of associative learning in Chapter 6). Seligman (1971) then proposed his own reformulation, known as " preparedness theory”. This theory is important for understanding of the polyhedral set of animal intelligence. We will consider this aspect of intelligence in Part VII.