PSYCHOLOGY MODELS IN PROBLEM SOLVING
BEHAVIOURISM
Edward L. Thorndike is an American behaviourist .He is one of the earliest researchers who are conducted research on problem solving.His thesis ,Animal Intelligence ; An Experimental Study Of Associative Processes In Animals that be published in 1911 ,had been considered as a major contributions in the psychology field.Based on the result findings from the experiment where he locked cats in closed cage .He concluded that ,the cats ability to escaped from the closed cage is due to trial-and-error learning.This is because ,the cats still took a long time to escaped from the caged despite of their successful escaping from the caged in the earlier trials.Generally,it is safe to claimed that animals who are showing actions,behaviours ,and,abilities that might initially seen as amusing such as dancing monkeys,pianist dogs,and ,painter elephants are unlikely to learn it through their own insightful reflection .These animals learn it through vigorous training and high likely be abused by their trainers in order to condition them to do certain behaviours.Nevertheless,Thorndike have develop his law of effect after observing the cats escaping behaviour during the experiments.However,in the era of 1920s and 1930s ,Thorndike theory and experiments have been criticized by German psychologists who are be well known as Gestaltists .According to Gestaltists ,the Thorndike’s experiments did not use fair problem situation.From their perspectives ,the relationship between the cats’ behaviour which was hitting the pole and the desired consequences which were the opening of the cage did not show any concrete objective behind the problem selection.Eysenck, and Keane (2005).To conclude ,base...
... middle of paper ...
...fitted of the whole societies due to the difference of purpose it be created with the function that people need the most.According to Greeno,(1974),despite of General Problem Solver is better than humans at remembering on what has happened on a problem.It still lacking compared to human due to the fact that it focuses on only a single move whereas humans often plan small sequences of moves .So,it means that humans are better than General Problem Solving in area of planning future moves.In 2002,Handley ,Capon,Copp,and Harper found that indidvidual differences in spatial working memory capacity predicted solution on the Tower of Hanoi task,whereas,verbal working memory capacity did not.This is not even can be predicted by Genearal Problem Solver which brings the meaning that did not priotize or care about individual differencesin strategy and speed of problem solving
Skinner, B.F. A Brief Survey of Operant Behavior. Cambridge, MA: B. F. Skinner Foundation. 1938
He took an environmental approach to the study. His method was the use of the operant conditioning box also known as Skinner box helped understand different behaviors that occurred during different environments. He stimulated a system of rewards and punishments and reinforcements. When the pigeon or rat received a reward, the animal performed the behavior more often and when it received a punishment, it performed the behavior less. He first tested positive reinforcement which he made rats press a lever for food. It encouraged the rat to perform more of the behavior. He also used negative reinforcement which added an uncomfortable stimulus. He placed an electric current in the box. The rats learn to avoid it. They even learned to stop when he turned on the light indicating the circuit will soon turn on. This behavior was known as Avoidance or Escape Learning. Both positive and negative reinforcements encourage good behavior. He also used punishment. Unlike the reinforcements, punishments were used to discourage unwanted behaviors rather than promote good behavior. It was performed by adding an unfavorable stimuli or removing the rewarding stimuli. When the rat was punished, its unwanted behavior decreased. When Skinner, removed the punishment, the bad behavior returned. He placed a hungry rat. The rat would pull the lever for food, but no food would come out. The rat later stopped pulling it learning it had no purpose. He studied that the more the rat pulled the lever, the higher the probability that the rat will quit pulling it; he developed an equation known as response and extinction rate. Response rate, the domain, is that rate of how hard a person performed an action and extinction rate, the range, is the rate that the person performed the action less and less. As the response rate increase, so this extinction rate. He used a token economy, a type of positive reinforcement, which a person was given a “token” which can be
Rationalism and empiricism were two philosophical schools in the 17th and 18th centuries, that were expressing opposite views on some subjects, including knowledge. While the debate between the rationalist and empiricist schools did not have any relationship to the study of psychology at the time, it has contributed greatly to facilitating the possibility of establishing the discipline of Psychology. This essay will describe the empiricist and rationalist debate, and will relate this debate to the history of psychology.
This essay addresses the working memory model which was proposed by Baddeley and Hitch (1974 in Smith & Kosslyn, 2007) as a response to Atkinson and Shiffrins (1968 in Smith, 2007) multi-store model. According to Baddely and Hitch the multi-store model failed to explain most of the complexities of the human memory and viewed it as being too simplistic. They argued that the short term memory store must have more components rather it being a single inflexible store as suggested previously by Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968). The working memory model is therefore an enhancement of the multi store model. According to Baddeley and Hitch working memory is a limited- capacity system that stores and processes information.
In the following essay I will be looking into the study conducted by Watson and Rayner (1920) on a small child known as ‘Little Albert’. The experiment was an adaptation of earlier studies on classical conditioning of stimulus response, one most common by Ivan Pavlov, depicting the conditioning of stimulus response in dogs. Watson and Rayner aimed to teach Albert to become fearful of a placid white rat, via the use of stimulus associations, testing Pavlov’s earlier theory of classical conditioning.
The study of psychology began as a theoretical subject a branch of ancient philosophy, and later as a part of biological sciences and physiology. However, over the years, it has grown into a rigorous science and a separate discipline, with its own sets of guidance and experimental techniques. This paper aims to study the various stages that the science of psychology passed through to reach its contemporary status, and their effects on its development. It begins with an overview of the historical and philosophical basis of psychology, discusses the development of the various schools of thought, and highlights their effects on contemporary personal and professional decision-making.
Hergenhahn, B. R. (2009). An introduction to the history of psychology (6th ed., p. 224,
In the video we see Thorndike using a hungry cat and putting that cat in a box in which food is in clear site outside the box, all the cat has to do is to find its way out by pulling or stepping on the treadle or pulling on a wire. When Thorndike first placed the cat in the box he was unable to see any flashes of insight and the successful actions appeared by chance and once the cat realized how to escape they were able to do it quicker and quicker. He doesn’t believe that the animals understand the consequence of their behavior until it happens and this is where trial and error comes from. Animals don’t just come in and see the puzzle and are able to solve it instead they try multiple things might fail or commit error a couple of times and learning from those errors they are able to learn and succeed. A real life example of this is for example a little kid being curious of touching the stove. The little kid doesn’t know the consequence of his or her actions. So when the child touches the hot stove and realizes it was a mistake to do it because it caused pain then the child might not repeat the
The Behaviourist and Psychodynamic perspective are based on experiences during childhood. John B. Watson arose with the Behaviourist perspective affirming that the aggressive behaviour is learnt by environment as well as an external approach trough observation. Referent to the above, the children as well as the animals imitate behaviour from adults and people, we are saying this by an experiment performed
This essay will firstly briefly describe the theories and important facts about the original multi-store model of memory (MSM) and the working memory model (WMM).
It is nearly impossible to say whether non-human animals are intelligent. Most studies, in this field of psychology, were carried out on primates, and it is thought that these animals are naturally superior. It seems most behaviour in the research discussed in this essay can be explained through association learning, therefore not actually a result of intelligence. It is difficult to falsify whether animals are intelligent or not because, although they are able to solve problems they only show some aspects to suggest ToM.
There are five main contributors to behaviorism. They are Ivan Pavlov, John Watson, B.F. Skinner, Albert Bandura, and Joseph Wolpe. The beh...
This essay will first explore what classical conditioning is by using Ivan Pavlov’s famous experiment with dogs to explain how it works. It will then go on to describe how classical conditioning led to more research by Edward L. Thorndike and B.F. Skinner in the study of instrumental behaviour (Gleitman et al. 2011). It will also mention briefly what similarities can be found between operant and classical conditioning before explaining in detail what operant conditioning is (Skinner’s experiment with the operant
The behavioral perspective is a theoretical perspective that says that abnormal behavior is caused by flawed learning experiences (Halgin and Whitbourne, 2013). B.F Skinner, the most common behaviorist, believed a person’s environment or anything external can influence a person mentally (AllPsych, 2011). The main point of the behavioral perspective is how the environment affects a person’s overall behavior (AllPsych, 2011). The three types of behavioral theories are classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and contiguity theory. Operant conditioning is when a person learns behaviors through reinforcement (Halgin and Whitbourne, 2013). Skinner studied operant conditioning by doing experiments using dogs that he placed in a “Skinner Box” (McLeod, 2011). Contiguity theory says that any stimulus and response that is connected will be associated with each other (Ramo and Howe-Tennant). Contiguity theory comes from the work of E. R. Guthrie (Ramo and Howe-Tennant). Classical conditioning is a learning connection between an original stimulus and a naturally evoking stimulus that causes an automatic reflexive reaction. Classical conditioning was the first type of learning to be discovered (Halgin and Whitbourne, 2013). Classical conditioning was also the first to be studied by behaviorist (Halgin and Whitbourne, 2013). Classical conditioning was discovered by Ivan Pavlov (AllPsych, 2011). During Pavlov’s experiments, he would put meat powder in dogs mouths that had tubes inserted in different organs to measure the dogs body responses (AllPsych, 2011). Pavlov found that the dogs began to salivate before the meat powder was presented to them (AllPsych, 2011). He also found that the dogs began to salivate as soon as the person feedi...
Behaviorism is the point of view where learning and behavior are described and explained in terms of stimulus-response relationships. Behaviorists agree that an individual’s behaviors is a result of their interaction with the environment. Feedback, praise and rewards are all ways people can respond to becoming conditioned. The focus is on observable events instead of events that happen in one’s head. The belief that learning has not happened unless there is an observable change in behavior. “The earliest and most Ardent of behaviourists was Watson (1931; Medcof and Roth, 1991; Hill 1997). His fundamental conclusion from many experimental observations of animal and childhood learning was that stimulus-response (S-R) connections are more likely to be established the more frequently or recently an S-R bond occurs. A child solving a number problem might have to make many unsuccessful trials before arriving at the correct solution” (Childs, 2004).