Edward Tolman's Psychology As The Behaviorist Views It?

The period in American psychology during 1930 through 1970 is described as being the period of neo-behaviorism (Behjamin, 2014). The psychologists during this time period were interested in theory and focused their research on learning and motivation, argued over the role of reinforcement in learning, and used animals as objects of their study (Behjamin, 2014). Edward Tolman’s contributions to the field of psychology during the neo-behaviorism period entailed the creation of the cognitive theory of learning, which had been in contrast to the theories of Thorndike and Hull that thought learning was a strict stimulus-response connection (VanderZwaag, 1998). In one of his known studies involved maze running and how reinforcement plays in the way rats learn their way through the maze which leads to the theory of latent learning (VanderZwaag, 1998). Tolman had made many

This paper had been identified to be the “blueprint” for behaviorist psychology for the use of the terms but to ignore the questions about any phenomena associated with them (Harzem, 2004). In this publication, there is a clear sense of his methodological objections to introspection and to experimental psychology’s unified focus on consciousness, according to Watson there are researchers of his time that studied animal behavior that were often compelled to speculate how their behavioral outcomes informed an understanding of human consciousness (Madden, 2013) In Watson’s view, mental life was conceived to not simply exist with discarding the long-standing concern with conscious mental functioning as a subject matter and introspection as a method (Moore, 2011). After Watson’s departure from the world of academia, behaviorism moved from the center of attention, the debate had been replaced by theories of