A multiple unit system of maze construction.
Year: 1919
Type: article
Abstract: The maze mode of experimentation is one that has had a great deal of use in the psychology of recent years.It may be said to have established itself pretty definitely among the methods of the laboratory.The general idea was used by Thorndike, when doing his pioneer work on animals, in the form of a simple pen or labyrinth for chicks formed of books-on-end.Small and Kinnamon did early work on animals with more elaborate mazes, particularly of the well-known Hampton Court pattern.This and other forms were used for work on various animals by Porter, Rouse, Allen, Sackett, Watson, Carr, Peterson, Vincent, Richardson, and others; and Watson and his students, including Bassett, Hubbert, and Lashley, have been using mazes built on the plan of concentric circles.This type of apparatus has recommended itself as peculiarly well adapted for the study of habit formation in animals.In the successive trials of a subject to thread his way through the complex passage-ways to reach his goal, the time consumed in each trial, the errors or ineffective variations made, and the distance covered, are all subject to exact measurement and record.The rate of progress is thus accurately indicated, and many of the technical problems connected with learning are readily approachable {e.g., correlation of rate of learning with age, with temporal distribution of trials, with species of animal used, with kinds of incentives employed, etc.).Simple mazes have also been used by Yerkes for studying sensory discriminations.The applicability of the labyrinth method to the study of human learning came to be appreciated in time, and some of the problems 223
Source: Psychological Bulletin
DOI: 10.1037/h0072860
Authors: R. H. Stetson, J. F. Dashiell
Language: English
Topic: Memory and Neural Mechanisms
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2022512939