Gregory A. Kimble

The association value of 320 selected words and paralogs

The method of Glaze was used to scale 320 words and paralogs for meaningfulness. One hundred Ss provided data from which three such measures were derived. Employing the most conventional of these measures (percentage of Ss responding in less than 2.5 sec) to select the items to be learned, a validating study demonstrated the usual relationship between association value and speed of learning. Other investigations have employed the materials successfully for purposes of control when the main interest of the experiment was in some other problem.

Mother Nature's Bag of Tricks Is Small

There is greater unity in psychology than our internal squabbles might suggest because Mother Nature uses the same tricks in many contexts. There are fundamental principles that apply widely in psychology and have parallels in biology and physics. Behavior is a function of potentials that become manifest when the strenght of instigation to action exceeds a threshold. Thresholds result from exciting and inhibiting tendencies that are instigated along with a response of interest. Adaptive behavior is a blend of just two possibilities available to organisms, changing themselves to accommodate an unyielding environment or changing the world to meet their needs.

Extinction of R-S associations and performance on recall trials without informative feedback

The present study was concerned with the systematic increase in the number of correct responses which typically occurs over a series of unreinforced recall trials in paired-associate learning. In particular, the hypothesis that backward associations account for this increase was tested. There were two groups of 20 S s under each of the A-B, C-D and A-B, C-B paradigms. One group in each of the paradigms was presented with the A items during a series of eight recall trials and was required to recall the B items; the other two groups were presented with the B items and were asked to recall the A items. Since the A-B, C-B paradigm is known to cause retroactive inhibition of backward associations, it was expected the A-B, C-B groups would not demonstrate an increase in performance over the unreinforced recall trials. This expectation was not confirmed; all groups showed a significant increase in the number of correct responses over the eight recall trials. Analysis of the details of performance suggested that (a) the improvement occurs mainly because of an increasing availability of responses, (b) in the A-B, C-D paradigm there is no retention loss when all responses are recovered, and (c) that backward and forward associations are interrelated in verbal learning so that extinguishing one weakens the other.

Categories of Learning and the Problem of Definition: COMMENTS ON PROFESSOR GRANT'S PAPER

Publisher Summary This chapter presents the categories of learning and the problem of definition. The problem of establishing a satisfactory taxonomy for learning is a definitional problem involving the same issues as other problems of this type: (1) there should be a clear operational distinction among categories of learning, and (2) these operationally established categories should have some significance for behavior. In the case of the distinction between instrumental and classical conditioning, the first of these requirements is clearly satisfied in terms of the contingency, or lack of it, between the response and reinforcement. The second requirement poses certain issues that have been of central interest to the psychology of learning for several decades. The significant differences between the classical and instrumental conditioning are: (1) classical conditioning is a process that applies only to involuntary, elicited behavior, whereas instrumental conditioning applies to voluntary, emitted behaviour; (2) the evidence suggests that classical conditioning involves the establishment of associations as a result of S—S or S—R contiguity and that instrumental conditioning obeys the law of effect; and (3) the partial reinforcement is a destructive procedure with classical conditioning and not with instrumental conditioning.

Behaviorism and Unity in Psychology

The defining feature of behaviorism is that it works with publicly observable stimuli and responses. One version, stimulus-response behaviorism, predicts responses from stimuli or situations. Another version, response-response behaviorism, predicts targeted responses from other responses. Unobservable mental states are intervening variables—hypothetical constructs if they have postulated material existence—that mediate these relationships. Cognition, affect, and reaction tendency are the major conceptual categories in this psychology. Its basic axioms state that behavior is (a) a function of enduring potentials for and temporary instigation to action, (b) controlled by excitation and inhibition, and (c) a blend of coping in situations in which organisms have control and adaptation in situations in which control is lacking. This view offers the hope of bringing unity to psychology.

INFLUENCE OF UNPAIRED UCS PRESENTATIONS ON EYELID CONDITIONING

Kimble, Mann, and Mort (1955) presented evidence that, following a small number of paired CS-UCS trials, presentations of the UCS alone lead to an increase in eyelid conditioning which is approximately equal to that obtained with continued CS-UCS pairings. Although this phenomenon has been replicated in the laboratory at Duke University (Dufort & Kimble, 1958), other attempts to obtain it (Goodrich, Ross, & Wagner, 1957, 1959; McAllister & McAllister, 1960) have been unsuccessful. These latter experiments have, in fact, routinely obtained a slightly diminished level of conditioning following unpaired UCS presentations. At the present time no adequate explanation for these discrepant results exists. This study was undertaken to determine whether subtle differences in instructions to Ss were responsible. METHOD

A Search for Principles in Principles of Psychology

Principles of Psychology was published as an introductory textbook, with the contemporary virtue of having chapters that “can be assigned in any order.” It is a compendium of speculation, with very few connecting threads to tie materials together. This article reports one psychologists travels through the Principles, in search of latent organizing structure, using as a guidebook the methodological and substantive content of two recent articles (Kimble, 1989, 1990a). The journey had its low and high points: The methodology encountered was hardly worth the trip. The exciting moments were the views of correspondences between James’ insights and what we know today.

John B. Watson's Behaviorism: A Retrospective Review.

Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1997, Vol 42(1), 23-28. Review of book: Behaviorism, by John B. Watson (1925). In this retrospective review, the reviewer argues that the negative evaluation of behaviorism in psychology appears to originate in faulty understandin

Eyelid conditioning at low US intensities and eyeblink threshold

In Experiment 1 eyelid conditioning was obtained for females but not for males, using an air puff capable of supporting 4 mm of mercury. In Experiment 2 thresholds for blinking to an air puff were obtained for 26 Ss, and 60 classical eyelid conditioning trials with an air puff US of 17 mm were administered. The rank order correlation between threshold and percent CRs during acquisition was not significant.