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3) Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka: Gestalt school and The Mentality of Apes
Another important school of thought to emerge at the turn of the 20th century was the Gestalt school. Convinced that the segmented approach of most psychologists to the study of human
4) Ivan Pavlov: Classical Conditioning
Despite featuring as one of the first experimenters in our series with footage, Ivan Pavlov didn’t really start out with his experiment hoping to contribute to the study of psychology.
5) John Watson: Little Albert Experiment
John Watson, an American psychologist made the study of psychology more scientific by starting a new school of thought, Behaviourism. He defined psychology as the “study of observable behaviour” (which
6) B. F. Skinner: Operant Conditioning
Following Pavlov’s exploration of the phenomenon of Classical Conditioning came a large number of experiments and studies into the methods and processes of learning. Subsequently, this era shaped and greatly
7) Edward Thorndike: Puzzle Box
A worthwhile mention, before we proceed onto the other implications of both classical and operant conditioning studies, is Thorndike’s work with cats, which eventually led to his Law of Effect,
9) Miller and Hart: Motivation and Reward in Learning
With this segment, we move to another decade of experiments, the 1940s. A large amount of progress in the field came from this era too, as we’ll be seeing with
8) Mowrer: Social Behaviour in Rats
Mowrer’s classical experiment on Social Behaviour in Rats is n excellent example of the generalizability of behaviouristic research (although Mowrer himself went on to work upon ideas from many different
10) John Garcia: Taste Aversion
With the mention of John Garcia, we move into the 1950s. It was another era booming with psychological innovations. Further on in the series, under Developmental Psychology Studies, we’ll be
III. Developmental Psychology Studies
Studies in the types of learning under the behaviourists quickly led research to looking at the direct impact on humans, especially in younger stages of life, which are looked at
11) Albert Bandura: Bobo Doll Experiment
The 1960s was another decade marking massive progress in the field of psychological study, ranging from developmental studies such as Bandura’s study of social learning, or Gibson and Walk’s Visual
12) Jean Piaget: Theory of Stages of Cognitive Development
While the behaviourist school of psychologists was busy in the US with Conditioning and examining the different types and processes of learning by testing animals in the 1930s, Jean Piaget
13) Harry Harlow: Dependency in Monkeys
Alongside the boom in social psychology experimentation, Harry Harlow, working at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with rhesus monkeys as subjects, studied various phenomena occurring at infant stages in these animals.