Cat Science
In this chapter, we discuss how Pavlov’s dogs and Thorndike’s cats defined the mainstream of psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence for the Twentieth century and defied the discovery of the method of understanding.
An animal and a scientist learn to understand the world around them with no need for reinforcement. The first Russian Nobel laureate Ivan Pavlov arrived at such a conclusion in 1933 and shared it in a paper that wasn’t published for 40 years after it was written.
The reason why that paper was neglected even by Pavlov’s most committed pupils was that it declared a blatant heresy against the preaching of their worshipped teacher, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov himself.
One can’t avoid seeing a deep irony in the fact that in the same year when Pavlov suggested that there was another way of learning, in 1933 the two most influential American scientists in the area of psychology of learning, Edward Thorndike and B. F. Skinner both adopted Pavlov’s term ‘reinforcement’ to describe the major underlying process of any learning. The final drop of irony was added by Pavlov citing Thorndike’s puzzle-box experiments with cats as evidence supporting the idea that animals and humans learn by using the method of science i.e. by connecting external objects in the environment without direct interaction with them.
Pavlov coined the term reinforcement in 1903 to describe the establishment and strengthening of the connection (association) between unconditioned and conditioned stimuli. In his renowned experiments on dogs, he simultaneously gave food to a dog (unconditioned stimulus) and rang a bell (stimulus he wanted to condition). Sometimes he only rang the bell.
He measured the secretion of gastric juice as the dog’s response to stimuli. When the dog had begun to secrete gastric juice in response only to the bell the connection was considered established successfully. However, if the bell wasn’t reinforced periodically by food, the connection fell apart.
We can think about food in this experiment as a stimulus when seen and sniffed and also as a reward when eaten with a sensation of pleasure. Will the connection between conditional and unconditional stimuli be established if dogs in Pavlov’s experiments when a bell is ringing just will see food but not actually eat it?
Edward Thorndike was locking cats in boxes with several levers, buttons, and bars inside. An animal could open the box’s door by either pulling a lever or pushing a button or pressing a bar. There was only one proper action that was leading to a successful escape.
Containment in a cage was an unpleasant stimulus that invoked a cat’s response. When the cat by sheer accident, as Thorndike believed, performed the proper action for the first time, the animal experienced the pleasure of freedom as a reward shortly afterward.
However, the connection between a stimulus and a response was established before but not in parallel or after the reinforcing sensation of pleasure. Thorndike called that behavior of cats finding a new association between a stimulus and a response “the method of trial and error, with accidental success.”
Pavlov defined it as an association an animal establishes between external stimuli but not in relation to itself.
Thorndike focused on the process of reinforcement that, in his opinion, took place each time the animal was rewarded shortly after the repetition of a successful response.
Pavlov focused on the fundamental differences between reinforcement and impulses governing the trial and error method of Thorndike’s cats. In trial and error “the formation of an association, on the one hand, and the maintenance of the necessary motor activity of the animal, as well as the necessary tone of the cortex, on the other, are separated from each other,” he wrote pointing out that in the process of reinforcement “they are fused.”
Thorndike of 1898 believed that “the method of trial and error, with accidental success,” observed in his experiments had been antiquated and replaced by faster and better ways of learning in humans.
He even suggested that “this animal-like method of learning” might explain “the slow progress of primitive man, the long time between stone age and iron age, for instance.”
Pavlov of 1933 had another view. “In Thorndike’s experiments, the animal becomes familiar with the relations of external things among themselves, with their connections.” He wrote. “Therefore, it is the knowledge of the world. This is the embryo, the germ of science.”
Pavlov clearly stated that the only difference between the way of learning demonstrated by Torndike’s cats and the scientific method was in the fact that science was more and more relying on old already existing knowledge in its search for new.
“I would not advocate this animal-like method of learning in place of the later ones unless it does the same work better.” Thorndike wrote.
Thirty-five years later Pavlov found the most pivotal learning work that only the animal-like method discovered by Thorndike could do. “Each new association of external things is the addition of knowledge, and the use of this knowledge is what we call understanding. It is impossible to imagine understanding something in any other way. How can one understand something without knowing different associations, i.e. connections of external objects!” He wrote.
Thorndike suggested in his 1989 paper that the method of learning discovered by him will be useful for understanding how children learn. Jean Piaget and Jerome Brunner proved that he was right by introducing the same method as the way how babies learn.
He also predicted that the method will have an impact on anthropology. Claude Levi-Strauss, the father of modern anthropology, rediscovered that method as ‘the science of concrete.’
However, as in the case of Pavlov, only reinforcement-based methods survived from his discoveries and were widely adopted in mainstream psychology, neuroscience, and later artificial intelligence.
That was another irony that, probably, the most important discoveries of Pavlov and Thorndike didn’t survive but the method of animal-like learning was since rediscovered many times. One of the most accurate descriptions of that method was left to us by Nobel laureates in physics Max Planck and Albert Einstein.
Planck described the general framework of how children and scientists created and updated their picture of the world. Einstein described his own way of thinking. We’ll discuss their findings in the next chapter.
Summary
Sometimes, when you took an erroneous turn on the road and followed the wrong path for a very long time your only option is to go all the way back to the junction where the mistake was originally made to pick up the right turn this time.
The approach of Thorndike, Skinner, and early Pavlov has been prevailing in mainstream psychology and neuroscience for more than a century. However, the brightest scientific minds in those and other fields kept rediscovering that ‘animal-like method of learning’ throughout the Twentieth century. The quest for the creation of artificial general intelligence should reinvigorate the interest in that method of learning practiced in its clearest form by animals, savages, babies, and true scientists because only this method can lead to understanding — the factor underlying all other methods of learning, including those based on reinforcement.
References:
- Ivan Pavlov (1933) Psychology as a Science. Unpublished and Little-known Materials of I.P. Pavlov (1975)
- Edward Thorndike (1898) Animal intelligence: An experimental study of the associative processes in animals. Monograph Supplement №8
- B.F. Skinner (1933) The rate of establishment of a discrimination. Journal of General Psychology.
- Edward Thorndike (1933) A theory of the action of the after-effects of a connection upon it. Psychological Review
- Ivan Pavlov (1903) The Experimental Psychology and Psychopathology of Animals
- Claude Levi-Strauss (1962) The Savage Mind
- Jean Piaget (1947) The Psychology of Intelligence
- Jerome Brunner (1964) The Course of Cognitive Growth
- Max Plank (1942) The Meaning and Limits of Exact Science
- Jacques S. Hadamard (1954) Albert Einstein’s testimonial for An Essay on the Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field
Next Chapter: Another Way (of Learning)
