PSY
3044 – Psychological Science II Christine
Ruva
q
“Old
behaviors tend to come together in new situations to produce new and
interesting behaviors. The emergence of
new behavior in such situations is what leads many people to speak of ‘cognition’ or ‘creativity.’ By offering the
environmental histories that produce such behavior, Epstein and Skinner offer a
more objective account.”
A. Since the 1950s psychologists have used a child’s behavior towards
its own reflection as a measure of the self-concept. In the 1960s the rouge test of self-concept was devised in
which some rouge is smeared on the young child’s nose and then the child is
encourage to look in the mirror. If the
child touches the rouge spot he/she is said to have “awareness” of itself and
possess a “self-concept.”
B. How do Behaviorists define a child’s behavior when he/she is in
front of the mirror? How do they go
about demonstrating that there explanation can explain the behavior?
q
Example:
Pigeon with a blue dot place under a big and then put in front of a mirror.
_______________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
II. INSIGHT
A. Wolfgang Köhler (1917): Insightful problem solving behavior in
chimpanzees.
B. What do behaviorist attribute such “insightful” problem solving
behavior to? How do they go about demonstrating that there explanation can
explain the behavior?
q
Example:
Pigeon solving the box-and-banana problem.
_______________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
q
Skinner:
“What we’ve done in the Columban Simulation Project is to show that by
exploiting what we know about the contingencies of reinforcement, we can
produce extremely complex behavior which would ordinarily be attributed to
higher mental processes of one sort or another.