A Little History

Psychology 3306

Dead White guys are not all bad

• As is the case with all science, the first investigations into learning were done by philosophers

• Aristotle– Contiguity (both spatial

and temporal)– Similarity– contrast

Empiricism

• Then the Romans ruled the known world• Then the barbarians came• Yadda yadda yadda• Then along cam the British Empiricists• Believed that knowledge was all based on experience• Hobbes and Lock are probably the best examples• Locke’s blank paper or ‘tabula rasa’

The Nativists were their rivals• Them being the Empiricists• Kant and Descartes• Descartes thought of the

mind and the body as separate things

• Kant believed that we were born with natural concepts like space and time

Rules of Association

• The empiricists came out with a set of rules about how different things were associated

• Sesnations and ideas• Simple sensations -> simple ideas• Simple ideas come to be associated through

contiguity into concepts

More rules

• Concepts of two simple ideas are called complex ideas

• Two complex ideas become duplex ideas• Whatever….• But seriously, some of these ‘rules’ are not

that far off from those that we think of in modern learning theory and indeed concept formation

Thomas Brown’s Secondary Principles of Association

• Length of time• ‘liveliness’• Frequency of pairings• Recency of pairings• Freedom from other pairings• ‘Constitutional’ differences

Brown and his principles

• Emotional state• Health• Prior habits• Frankly, this is amazing. This list is darned

close to the kind of things we talk about today

Ebbinghaus• Well, these were all

great ideas, but had not been tested.

• Cue Hermann Ebbinghaus

• Strangely, both the behaviourists and the cognitive types claim him as their own

• Nonsense syllables

Ebbinghaus

• Studied himself• Found savings• Repetition was key• Classic fogetting curve• Contiguity• Reversal was detrimental, so it was not just

contiguity but also contingency

‘Modern’ ideas

• Eventually the ball was picked up by Skinner, Thorndike, Watson et al

• We owe a great deal of our modern ideas about learning to the ideas of the British associationists and later, Ebbinghaus.