Timothy Mason's Site

A : Recap

• Jerison - primary function of language - representation

We should also be aware of a third - particularly associated with IQ testing - intelligence is unitary - there are no modules, and all human learning is carried out in the same way - and basically is founded, as we shall see, on the behaviourist model of Stimulus and Response. 

B : The psychology of development : Behaviourism

To the behaviourist, this was nonsense. There is no reason to believe that we can ever explain behaviour in terms of motivations, ideas, and so on. These are simply post hoc justifications - often romantic, self-serving, and above all, misleading. The only firm evidence that we have of how the human nervous system works is the actual ways that men and women behave. Behaviour can be observed and can be measured - ideally in laboratory conditions. We should restrict ourselves to this kind of evidence - the concept of mind is both metaphysical and misleading.

Learning is based upon a fundamentally utilitarian view of the relationship between organisms and their environment. All organisms seek pleasure, and avoid pain. Behaviours that result in pleasure become positively reinforced - that is to say that the organism becomes more likely to repeat them. Behaviours that result in pain are negatively reinforced - the organism will tend to avoid them in the future. Under these circumstances, learning is to be conceived of as a process of conditioning. Conditioning itself can be of two kinds 

• Classical conditioning

• An early example of the effects of this kind of conditioning on a human being is the case of the child known as 'Little Albert'. Little Albert was subjected to a loud noise every time he was presented with a furry toy. After a number of such experiences, Little Albert gave signs of distress whenever he saw anything furry - including his mother when she wore a fur-coat. (For a skeptical view, follow this link)

• Is classical conditioning very important in human learning? A number of psychologists do believe that emotional responses can be conditioned in this way - neutral stimuli become attached to certain features of the environment, and these subsequently arouse strong feelings of fear - as in Albert's case - which may account for irrational phobias. They may also, of course, arouse more positive emotions, which may explain irrational attractions, such as the fetishisms.

• Operant conditioning

• - the connection between a given stimulus and response is increased when the response is followed by positive reinforcement.

Rewards further learning, while punishment or negative reinforcement hinder it. Thorndike used subjects who knew no Spanish, and presented them repeatedly with a Spanish word together with five English words. The subject had to guess which English word was equivalent to the Spanish one. He was then told whether he was right or wrong. The correct responses were reinforced - that is, once the subject had got the answer right, he would tend to repeat the correct guess on a later occasion. On the other hand, the incorrect response was not eliminated. Criticism does not appear to have the desired effect.

In another experiment, Estes found that rats that were trained to press a lever to obtain food would continue to press the lever even if they received electric shocks. A control group, who simply stopped receiving the food, stopped pressing the lever. Punishment can be seen as constituting a reward.

Thorndike's work has not gone uncriticised, and punishment does appear to have some effect. It is used with success in what is termed 'avoidance therapy - see the film 'A Clockwork Orange' to get some idea of what this involves. However, as we shall see, there are other reasons for not relying on punishment as a teaching technique.

Much animal training proceeds along these lines. B.F. Skinner, one of the best-known psychologists in this tradition, was able to train pigeons to play ping-pong. Skinner introduced the technique of the training box. A rat or a cat is introduced into a small box, in which there is a lever. The animal learns to press the lever in order to obtain food. 

With operant conditioning, learning is slower, but is more permanent if the desired behaviour is not rewarded on every occasion. This may be why people become addicted to fruit machines -

Skinner believed that language was learnt in just the same way. Children were rewarded by their parents when they produced speech, and so vocal behaviour was reinforced. This was the theory that caused Chomsky to react so vehemently. Towards the end of his life, Skinner came to believe that a number of behavioural traits were genetic in origin, but that the way in which they were subsequently shaped by the environment was according to the S-R model. He believed that schools were inefficient as learning environments, because they often reinforced the wrong kinds of behaviour, and also because they used negative reinforcement. He described a future in which children would learn through learning machines - the language laboratory is a rather distant cousin of Skinner's learning machine. 

The machines would be better than teachers because they would be much more patient, because they would progress at the rhythm of the individual learner, and because they would use only positive reinforcement. Perhaps most importantly, they would have been programmed by psychologists, who know how the human machine works, whereas most teachers do not.

Behaviourist theories of development, like most others, see children as progressing through a series of stages. Sidney Bijou, one of the leading behaviourists of today, sees three separate stages. The first of these he refers to as the Foundational Stage

• Foundational Stage

Characterised by extreme physiological immaturity, reflex behaviour, and the transition from random movements to biologically co-ordinated responses. At birth, the baby possesses only individual biological characteristics, and cannot be said to have a personality, innate intelligence or innate psychic drives. At this stage, although individual differences do exist, children are very similar to one another, and tend to develop in the same way.

• The Basic Stage

During the whole of this stage, the influence of biological immaturity declines, and peer and community socialisation becomes increasingly influential. This can be subdivided into three separate periods. These are - early childhood, middle childhood and adolescence. 

In the first period, from two to five years old - the basic personality structure is put in place. This occurs mainly within the family, and is largely the result of conditioning by adults. 

In the second period, the child enters the world of school and is thus subjected to the conditioning of the institution, and of the peer group. 

In adolescence, the peer group takes on still greater importance, and the young person is also more open to conditioning stimuli from the wider social system - through reading newspapers, watching television and so on.

• The Societal Stage

This is subdivided into adulthood, middle age and old age. The first two, says Bijou, are almost completely free of biological immaturity and almost completely dominated by community influences. With old age, we see a return of biological determinants with the onset of infirmities - both biological and psychological deterioration.

We will come across other such developmental schemes, and most of them are very similar in outline - though they differ considerably in their typifications of the processes involved. 

In the behaviourist tradition, as I have suggested, stress is laid upon the ways in which behaviour is reinforced - either negatively or positively - by the environment. I want to have a closer look at such mechanisms now, and we will attempt to see what kinds of applications, if any, they may have for the schoolteacher.

Positive vs. Negative Reinforcement

Imagine a child who is inattentive and disruptive in class. How can he be dealt with? At first sight, the answer from Behaviourism would seem to be relatively simple - reward him whenever he behaves in an acceptable manner, and punish him whenever he behaves disruptively. 

Thus it is that by punishing a child, instead of inducing him to cease behaving in the proscribed manner, we in fact reinforce the very behaviour that we wish to eliminate. One objection to punishment, then, is that it is not always the case that the person receiving the punishment actually experiences it negatively.

A second objection to punishment is that the person being punished may read the situation differently from the way the person doing the punishing does. An example would be the parent who, seeing the child doing something naughty, calls the child over and then smacks it. The child may connect the punishment not with the naughty behaviour, but with approaching the parent. The child to whom a mother says 'Wait 'til your father gets home' learns to dread the father rather than the behaviour. 

For punishment to work, it must be immediate, it must be consistent, and it must be clearly linked to the behaviour that is to be repressed - this is not a simple set of conditions. Behaviourists recommend shaping behaviour positively, through a system of rewards. This means working on the positive, rather than the negative - for example, if we find that a child is disruptive in class, we should not try to repress the disruptive behaviour, but rather reward those instances when he behaves in a non-disruptive way. The teacher must, therefore, learn to ignore behaviour that she disapproves of, rather than drawing attention to it.

Conclusion

In the realm of language teaching, as we have already seen, behaviourist learning theory underlay the approaches of the 60s and early 70s. These approaches cannot be said to have fulfilled their promises. The language laboratory - a close cousin to Skinner's teaching machines - has not had anything like the success expected of it. 

Behaviourism does have a certain plausibility about it. It certainly would seem to be true that some kinds of learning do function along lines that can be described according to the SR model. It is also probably true that, in most cases, rewards are more efficient than punishments. But the SR model does not account for all learning by any means. If you put a rat in a maze and simply let it explore, without offering any reward, the rat will work out the topography of the maze to some extent. The simple fact of being exposed to a certain environment, even in the absence of external reinforcement, leads to learning. 

Similarly, organisms may learn through simple observation - monkeys perform tasks better if they have been able to observe the task modelled - even though there was no external reinforcement during the observation. 

Moreover, the SR mode appears to leave to one side certain characteristics of the human ape that are important - sociability being one example. 

(If you wish to comment or ask a question, please write to tmason@timothyjpmason.com)