Psychology by Robert S. Woodworth (intellectual books to read .TXT) 📖

the successful reaction, and therefore the successful reaction is more intensely exercised than the unsuccessful. This seems like a pretty good explanation, though perhaps not a complete explanation. Limitations of the Law of Exercise

The law of exercise, with all its sub-laws, is certainly fundamental and universal; it is always in operation whenever anything is learned; and yet, just by itself, it goes only halfway towards accounting for learned reactions. For a reaction to be exercised, it must be made, and the law of exercise presupposes that it is made, and does not attempt to account for its being made in the first place.

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The law of exercise does not cover the formation of new linkages, but only the strengthening of linkages that are already working. It does not explain the attachment of a response to some other than its natural stimulus, nor the combination, of responses into a higher unit, nor the association of two facts so that one later recalls the other. We learn by doing, but how can we do anything new so as to start to learn? We learn by observing combinations of facts, but how in the first place do we combine the facts in our minds?

How, for example, can we learn to respond to the sight of the person by saying his name? Evidently, by exercising this linkage of stimulus and response. But how did we ever make a start in responding thus, since there is nothing about the person's looks to suggest his name? The name came to us through the ear, and the face by way of the eye; and if we repeated the name, that was a response to the auditory stimulus and not to the visual. How has it come about, then, that we later respond to the visual stimulus by saying the name?

In short, the more seriously we take the law of exercise, the more we feel the need of a supplementary law to provide for the first making of a reaction that then, by virtue of exercise, is strengthened.

This is the problem that occupied the older writers on psychology when they dealt with "association"; and their solution of the problem was formulated in the famous "laws of association". The laws of association were attempts to explain how facts got associated, so that later one could recall another.

These laws have a long history. From Aristotle, the ancient Greek who first wrote books on psychology, there came down to modern times four laws of association. Facts become associated, according to Aristotle, when they are {395} contiguous (or close together) in space, or when they are contiguous in time, or when they resemble each other, or when they contrast with each other. The psychologists of the earlier modern period, in the eighteenth and first part of the nineteenth centuries, labored with very good success to reduce these four laws to one comprehensive law of association. Contiguity in space and in time were combined into a law of association by contiguity in experience, since evidently mere physical contiguity between two objects could establish no association between them in any one's mind except as he experienced them together.

Association by Similarity

Continuing their simplification of the laws of association, these older psychologists showed that resemblance and contrast belonged together, since to be similar things must have something in common, and to be contrasted also two things must have something in common. You contrast north with south, a circle and a square, an automobile and a wheelbarrow; but no one thinks of contrasting north with a circle, south with an automobile, or a square and a wheelbarrow, though these pairs are more incongruous than the others. Things that are actually associated as contrasting with each other have something in common; and therefore association by contrast could be included under association by similarity. Thus the four laws had been reduced to two, association by contiguity and association by similarity.

The final step in this reduction was to show that association by similarity was a special case of association by contiguity. To be similar, two things must have something in common, and this common part, being contiguous with the remainder of each of the two things, establishes an indirect contiguity between the two things, a {396} sort of contiguity bridge between them. One thing has the parts or characteristics, A B X Y, and the similar thing has the parts or characteristics, C D X Y; and thus X Y, when seen in the second thing, call up A B, with which they are contiguous in the first thing.

A stranger reminds me of my friend because something in the stranger's face or manner has been met with before in my friend; it has been contiguous with my friend, and recalls him by virtue of this contiguity. The stranger, as a whole individual, has never been contiguous with my friend, but some characteristic of the stranger has been thus contiguous. In association by similarity, it is not the whole present object that arouses recall of the similar object, but some part of the present object. This kind of association is important in thinking, since it brings together facts from different past experiences, and thus assembles data that may be applied to a new problem. If every new object or situation could only be taken as a whole, it could not remind me of anything previously met; and I should be like an inexperienced child in the presence of each new problem; but, taken part by part, the novel situation has been met with before, and can be handled in the light of past experience.

Exactly what there is in common between two similar faces or other objects cannot always be clearly made out; but the common characteristic is there, even if not consciously isolated, and acts as an effective stimulus to recall.

Association by Contiguity

This reduction of all the laws of association to one great law was no mean achievement; and the law of association by contiguity in experience holds good. If one thing recalls another to your mind, you can be sure that the two {397} have been contiguous in your experience, either as wholes or piecemeal. For two things to become associated, they must be experienced together.

Yes, the law holds good, when thus stated--but notice that the statement is virtually negative. It says, in effect, that two things do not become associated unless they are contiguous in experience. If it were turned about to read that two things do become associated if they are contiguous in experience, it would no longer be a true law, for the exceptions would then be extremely numerous.

The memory and testimony experiments have brought many exceptions to light. Show a person twenty pictures in a row, and let him examine each one in turn so closely that he can later recognize every one of them; and still he will not have the adjacent pictures so associated that each one can call up the next in order. To accomplish his last task, he has to observe the order specifically; it is not enough that he simply experiences pictures together. Or, again, read to a person twenty pairs of words, asking him to notice the pairs so that later he can respond by the second word of any pair when the first word is given him; and read the list through three or four times, so that he shall be able to make almost a perfect score in the expected test; still he will have formed few associations between the contiguous pairs, and will make a very low score if you ask him to recite the pairs in order. Many similar experiments have yielded the same general result--contiguity in experience and still no association.

The law of association by contiguity is unsatisfactory from a modern standpoint because it treats only of the stimulus, and says nothing about the response. It states, quite truly, that stimuli must be contiguous in order that an association between them may be formed, but it neglects to state that the association, being something in us, must {398} be formed by our reaction to the stimuli. It is especially necessary to consider the response because, as we have just seen, the response is not always made and the association, therefore, not always formed. Only if the stimuli are contiguous, can the associating response be aroused, but they do not infallibly arouse it even if they are contiguous.

The law of contiguity is incomplete, also, because it is not applicable to the association of two motor acts into a coördinated higher unit, or of the combination of two primary emotions into a higher emotional unit.

In a word, the time-honored law of association is no longer satisfactory because it does not fit into a stimulus-response psychology. It comes down from a time when the motor side of mental performances was largely overlooked by psychology, and when the individual was pictured as being passively "impressed" with the combinations of facts that were presented to his senses.

The Law of Combination

What we need, then, as an improvement on the old law of association by contiguity, and as a supplement to the law of exercise, is some law governing the response to two or more contiguous stimuli. Now we already have such a law, which we put to some use in studying attention, [Footnote: See pp. 268-264.] and called the law of "combination", or of "unitary response to a plurality of stimuli". We had better fetch that law out again and put it in good repair, and see whether it is adequate for the job that we now have on hand. In a very general, abstract form, the law of combination read that "two or more stimuli may arouse a single joint response". Let us add a single word, which had not risen above the horizon when we formulated the law before, and say that {399} two or more contiguous stimuli may arouse a single joint response.

That seems very little to say; can we possibly go far with so simple a statement? Well, let us see. In saying that two or more stimuli arouse a single response, we imply that there is already some rudimentary linkage between each stimulus and their common response, and that this linkage is used in arousing the response. Now bring in our trusty law of exercise, and we see that the use, or exercise, of such a linkage may strengthen it to such an extent that, later, a single one of the stimuli may arouse the response which was originally aroused by the whole collection of stimuli.

Does that promise any better? Probably it requires further discussion and exemplification before its value can be appreciated. Let us, then, first discuss it a bit, and then apply it to the explanation of the chief varieties of learned reaction that have come to our attention.

The law of combination attempts to show how it comes about that a stimulus, originally unable to arouse a certain response, acquires the power of arousing it; and the law states that this occurs only when the originally ineffective stimulus is combined with others which can and do arouse the response. The ineffective stimulus, being one of a combination of stimuli which collectively arouse the response, participates to some slight degree in arousing that response and may thus become effectively linked with the response.

Notice an assumption underlying the law of combination. Evidently a stimulus could not take part in arousing a response unless there were some pre-existing linkage between it and the response. This linkage may however be extremely loose and feeble, and wholly incapable by itself of arousing the response. The assumption of pre-existing loose linkage between almost any stimulus and almost any response is justified by the facts of playful behavior and trial and error {400} behavior. In addition to the close reflex connections provided in the native constitution, and in addition also to the close connections formed in previous training, there