p.189 I shall devote the body of this paper to a description of experiments
with rats. But I shall also attempt in a few words at the close to indicate the significance of these findings on rats for
the clinical behavior of men.
p.189 First, there is a school of animal psychologists which believes that
the maze behavior of rats is a matter of mere simple stimulus-response connections.
p.192 Let us turn now to the second main school. This group (and I
belong to them) may be called the field theorists. We believe that in the course of learning something like a field
map of the environment gets established in the rat's brain.
p.192 The stimuli, which are allowed in, are not connected by just simple
one-to-one switches to the outgoing responses. Rather, the incoming impulses are usually worked over and elaborated
in the central control room into a tentative, cognitive-like map of the environment. And it is this tentative
map, indicating routes and paths and environmental relationships, which finally determines what responses,
if any, the animal will finally release.
p.193 But let us turn, now, to the actual experiments. The ones, out of
many, which I have selected to report are simply ones which seem especially important in reinforcing the theoretical
position I have been presenting. This position, I repeat, contains two assumptions: First, that learning
consists not in stimulus-response connections but in the building up in the nervous system of sets which function like cognitive
maps, and second, that such cognitive maps may be usefully characterized as varying from a narrow strip variety to a broader
comprehensive variety.
p.195 Once, however, they [rats] knew they were to
get food, they demonstrated that during these preceding non-rewarded trials they had learned where many of the blinds were.
They had been building up a 'map,' and could utilize the latter as soon as they were motivated to do so.
p.196 In short, they [rats] had acquired a cognitive map to the effect that
food was to the left and water to the right, although during the acquisition of this map they had not exhibited any stimulus-response
propensities to go more to the side which became later the side of the appropriate goal.
p.201 In other words, I feel that this experiment reinforces the notion
of the largely active selective character in the rat's building up of his cognitive map. He often
has to look actively for the significant stimuli in order to form his map and does not merely passively receive and react
to all the stimuli which are physically present.
p.202 When this was done [a linear maze was constructed for the rats
which involved a series of left-or-right path choices, in which the shortest path was configured at random], Krech
found that the individual rat went through a succession of systematic choices. That is, the individual animal might perhaps
begin by choosing practically all right-handed doors, then he might give this up for choosing practically all left-hand doors,
and then, for choosing all dark doors, and so on. These relatively persistent, and well-above-chance systematic types
of choice Krech called "hypotheses." In using this term he obviously did not mean to imply verbal processes in the
rat but merely referred to what I have been calling cognitive maps which, it appears from his experiments, get set
up in a tentative fashion to be tried out first one and then another until, if possible, one is found which works.
p.202-203 these hypothesis experiments, like
the latent learning, VTE, and "looking for the stimulus" experiments, do not, as such, throw light upon the widths of the
maps which are picked up but do indicate the generally map-like and self-initiated character of learning.
p.204 These results seem to indicate that the rats in this experiment
had learned not only to run rapidly down the original roundabout route but also, when this was blocked and radiating paths
presented, to select one pointing rather directly towards the point where the food had been or else at least to select
a path running perpendicularly to the food-side of the room.
As a result of their original training, the rats had, it
would seem, acquired not merely a strip-map to the effect that the original specifically trained-on path led to food
but, rather, a wider comprehensive map to the effect that food was located in such and such a direction
in the room.
p.207 My argument will be brief, cavalier, and dogmatic. For I am not myself
a clinician or a social psychologist. What I am going to say must be considered, therefore, simply as in the nature of a rat
psychologist's ratiocinations offered free. [JLJ - ratical...]
By way of illustration, let me suggest that at least the three dynamisms
called, respectively, "regression," "fixation," and "displacement of aggression onto outgroups" are expressions of cognitive
maps which are too narrow and which get built up in us as a result of too violent motivation or of too intense frustration.
