Psychology 10: Introduction to Psychology (Fall 2005)
Stimulus Response Paper for October 6, 2005
By
Halford H. Fairchild
Tolman, E.C. (1948). Cognitive maps in rats and men. Psychological Review, 55, 189-208.
Stimulus: This classic set of experiments demonstrated that rats, at least, were not mere “automatons” living out lives of “stimuli and responses.” Rather, their learning involves mental representations of places.
Response: These studies remove some of our human haughtiness – our sense of superiority over infrahuman organisms – by demonstrating that even the lowly rat is capable of mental representation. Rats in a maze, even in the absence of rewards, learned something.
It may be like humans in a culture, who learn something, and this may have something to do with group differences in things like SAT scores.
Animals are more intelligent than we think.
Tolman’s turn to societal problems (prejudice, discrimination, war) was reaching way beyond his data, yet I appreciated the effort. In particular, Tolman called for ending the “structural violence” of hunger and extreme motivation.
Extreme motivation – due to extreme
deprivation and impoverishment—is likely implicated in the violence we see in Darfur, or in
His emphasis on having “truly comprehensive cognitive maps” of the human world is akin to notions of “radius of brotherhood” developed by some of my colleagues at The University of Michigan.
Loftus, Elizabeth F. (1975). Leading questions and the eyewitness report. Cognitive Psychology, 7, 560-572.
Stimulus: This classic series of four experiments demonstrates that eyewitnesses can have false memories for events based on the nature of the questions that are asked.
Response: Note that memory distortions are also due to individual differences in how events are encoded, which may be affected by one’s emotional state or motivation.
Some of the effects were small, but they can be very meaningful, for example, in a death penalty case.