oh! Hull got subsumed into Skinner! [Skinner got all the credit]. But I need more fine distinctions: Hull vs Guthrie. I may need to look at Guthrie now – never heard of him.
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Hull (1952) was not the only behaviorist to tackle the thorny question of what occurred during the latent learning experiment. Guthrie, a contemporary of Hull, also built his theory on the S-R association foundation. Yet Guthrie crafted his theory rather differently. Although both Hull and Guthrie were interested in what Guthrie identified as “the examination of the successive changes that constitute learning” (1946, p. 17), he nonetheless focused on what he described as “the central problem of learning, namely, what change occurs in behavior as the result of a single action” (p. 16). Guthrie’s unit of investigation was an S-R occurrence and the association to which it gave rise. His position was that the contiguity of the stimulus and the response was responsible for the resulting association rather than “a subsequent reinforcement or reward which somehow works upon traces of the S-R event and confirms or destroys the associative connection” (p. 17; cf. Hilgard & Marquis, 1961).
Guthrie, then, viewed the behaviors of rats in the latent learning maze to be “acquired by associative learning … built up out of associations” (1952, p. 278). In the rat’s maze the presence of stimuli contiguous with a response on its first occasion will, when presented subsequently, elicit the same response. A single trial is sufficient for the learning to occur (i.e., for the association to be established at each choice point in the maze). Furthermore, Guthrie thought that the response itself produced a change in the stimulating environment by changing the organism’s orientation to the stimuli (e.g., by entering a cul-de-sac in a maze) or by changing in some way the stimulating environment.
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