E. James Archer

On Verbalizations and Concepts: COMMENTS ON PROFESSOR KENDLER'S PAPER

Publisher Summary This chapter presents the history of the development of methodological biases in the study of concepts. The three classes of studies: conditioning, discrimination learning, and concept formation lie along a dimension of stimulus and response complexity, but verbalization provides a qualitative difference. The recognition of the importance of verbalization is shown by the increased interest in such problems as varied as the effects of attitudes and self-instruction in eyelid conditioning, the effect of verbal pretraining on perceptual-motor skills, and strategy selection in concept identification. The chapter explains that it is therefore reasonable to insert between the stimulus and the response a little wisdom. The problem solving is less adequate when the rules are memorized by rote. The rules even show themselves to be subject to interference and forgetting. The rules get interchanged or garbled or forgotten completely when the concept has not been attained.