LEARNING, DEVELOPMENT, AND THINKING

Many have remarked about the relative quiet that preceded the modern storm of interest in the psychology of thinking. Among the behaviorists the period of quiet was premeditated. The earliest published polemic of Watson on behaviorism holds a surprising admission for one so intrepid. After a vigorous exposition of the virtues of a behavioristic approach he admits, with reluctance, that the situation is somewhat different when we come to a study of the more complex forms of behavior, such as imagination, judgment, reasoning, and conception. “Our minds,” he said, “have been so warped by the fifty-odd years which have been devoted to the study of states of consciousness that we can envisage these problems only in one way. We should meet the situation squarely and say that we are not able to carry forward investigations along all of these lines by the behavior methods which are in use a t the present time.” Of course, he quickly points out that the introspective method had already reached a cul-de-sac. These problems would be better put aside until they can be viewed as they arise from a fresh point-of-view and in more concrete settings. Nevertheless, a t about the same time, Hunter formulated a concrete setting to study higher mental processes. I refer, of course, to his well-known delayed reaction studies. Consideration of the results he obtained led him to recognize the inadequacy of the simple S-R paradigm for dealing with such behavior. I n 1924, he formulated an approach that had much in common with modern mediated response theories. However, in spite of these accomplishments, he “read the signs of the times” in the same way as Watson. He predicted that ‘ I . . . work in this area will become less and less dominant in the science until a thoroughgoing attack can be made upon it in the light of methods and results derived from work upon simpler but otherwise comparable processes.’’ It was characteristic of him to develop a quantitative method to study concept formation. Although I know of no prophesies that he made, he too deserted this area of investigation in favor of work on less complex processes. There were eminent psychologists like Wertheimer (1943) and Duncker (1935) who continued to investigate thinking, but the behaviorists for the most part left the fieId to concentrate on developing a better understanding of the phenomena of simple learning. For several decades, true to the forecast of Watson and Hunter, research on problem-solving by United States behaviorists was virtually suspended. Recently, however, workers have displayed a reawakening interest. There has been an upsurge of experimentation in problemsolving behavior. Whether this renascence is related to the progress made in accounting for simple learning or to a subtle kind of public demand I am not