Tyhesha Johnson
November 8, 2012
PSYN 207 DFA
Short Essay Assignment # 1

Thorndike connectionism

This semester we discussed a man by the name of Edward Thorndike and his theory of learning. I didn’t quite understand his experiments and his outlook on learning by what my professor had gone over. I thought that it would be good for me to do a little of my own. When I begin to study him it all started to make since to me of what my professor was trying to explain to the class. Thorndike was a psychologist who wanted to test the intelligence of animals. One of his experiments was called the Puzzle Box, where he placed a cat inside a box and see if the cat could figure out how to escape. He used different way to encourage the cat to escape the box one way was with a fish outside the box he knew that the cat would want the fish and would have to find a way out the box to get it. This experiment was timed but in order to get the cat would have to push the lever to get out. The cat’s intelligence was tested to see if it would figure out how to escape the box. This went on for some period of time the trial was tested over and over to see if the cat could come to the conclusion that the lever has to be pushed down every time. The cat would be rewarded after successfully escaping the box every time. This led to the conclusion that animals learn by trial and error or by a reward and punishment system.
Thorndike related this to his law of effect theory, which shows that any behavior that is followed by pleasant consequences is likely to be repeated and any behavior that is unpleasant and suffers from a negative consequence is likely to be stopped. This is shown within humans and as well as animals. For example when a parent wants to discipline a child they might use a reward system to get the child to do the right thing. This is also known as the token economy.