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Lifespan Development

Edward L. Thorndike (1874-1949)

Edward L. Thorndike was born in Williamsburg, MA in 1874. He studied at Wesleyan University and Harvard, and became professor at Teachers College, Columbia (1904-40), where he worked on educational psychology and the psychology of animal learning. He did pioneer work not only in learning theory but also in education practices, verbal behavior, comparative psychology, intelligence testing and the application of quantitative measures to sociopsychological problems. His works include Psychology of Learning (1914) and The Measurement of Intelligence (1926).

Edward L. Thorndike's Theory
The learning theory of Thorndike represents the original S-R framework of behavioral psychology: Learning is the result of associations forming between stimuli and responses. Such associations or habits become strengthened or weakened by the nature and frequency of the S-R pairings. The standard for S-R theory was trial and error learning in which certain responses come to dominate others due to rewards. The theory suggests that transfer of learning depends upon the presence of identical elements in the original and new learning situations; i.e., transfer is always specific, never general. In later versions of the theory, the concept of belongingness was introduced; connections are more readily established if the person perceives that stimuli or responses go together (Gestalt principles). Another concept introduced was polarity which specifies that connections occur more easily in the direction in which they were originally formed than the opposite. Thorndike also introduced the spread of effect idea, which means that rewards affect not only the connection that produced them but temporally adjacent connections as well.
The classic example of Thorndike's S-R theory was a cat learning to escape from a puzzle box by pressing a lever inside the box. After much trial and error behavior, the cat learns to associate pressing the lever (S) with opening...