Edwin Ray Guthrie was a professor of psychology at the university of
Washington from 1914-1956 till his retirement. He is known for his simple
approach to theory. He believed that theories for Thorndike, Pavlov and Watson
were unnecessarily complex and too subjective. His principles match with
Aristotle’s law of association.
His Learning Theory-
1.
The unique point of Guthrie’s learning theory
was: the law of contiguity->
which he states as follows (1952) “a combination of stimuli which has
accompanied a movement will on its recurrence tend to be followed by that
movement. Note that nothing is here said about “conformity waves” or reinforcement
or pleasant effects” .In other word what is being noticed becomes a signal for
what is being done.
2.
Guthrie said that learning between a stimulus
and its response gains its ultimate strength only in 1 trial. In totally it can
be explained that what was done last in the presence of a set of stimulus tends
to be repeated when the same set of stimuli recurs. This is called the Recency principle.
3.
Movement-produced stimuli- according to Guthrie a stimulus gives rise to a very small
psychological response which in turn acts as a stimulus for the next response.
Hence the stimuli-response is an extremely broken down set which integrate to
form a whole act. It is diagrammatically explained below: External
Stimulation (knocking at the door) -> overt response (looking at it) ->
movement-produced stimuli -> overt response(raising up to walk) ->
movement-produced stimuli -> overt response (walking to the door) ->
movement produced stimuli-> overt response(opening it).
4.
Guthrie rejected the notion of practice or reinforcement as they appear after the
response.
5.
He believed forgetting
was due to passage of time.
6.
Now Guthrie believed that learning to do a
particular work does not need practice or reinforcement but breaking of habits
to acquire a new one. He explained habit as a response that is associated with
a large number of stimuli. There are three ways of breaking habits: 1.
Threshold method. 2. Fatigue method. 3. Incompatible response method
7.
Punishment-
the effectiveness of punishment is determined by what it causes the punished organism
to do.
8.
Experiment
conducted- Guthrie along with Houston
observed escape of cats from a puzzle box. They used a large number of cats and
noted that each cat learned the escape route in its own particular way. Every
time the cat escaped, next time the cat produced the same responses that were
produced the last time. This was referred to stereotyped behavior then.
9.
Application-
Guthrie’s advice is to always practice the exact behaviors that are going to be
demanded of us in addition to the exact conditions.
10.
Criticism-
according to Guthrie very little transfer of learning takes place which is not true.
