VTE - Vicarious Trial and Error
p.337 The question I am going to discuss is the very straightforward and
specific one of "why rats turn the way they do, at a given choice-point in a given maze at a given stage of learning."
p.343 I suspect that there is also another reason for theories. Some
of us, psychologically, just demand theories. Even if we had all the million and one concrete facts, we would
still want theories to, as we would say, "explain" those facts. Theories just seem to be necessary to some of us to relieve
our inner tensions.
p.349 I come, now finally, to my own theory. But first, I would like
to make it clear that however complicated what I am actually going to present may appear, it will be in reality an over-simplified
and incomplete version.
p.358 The first of these two examples consists of those "lookings
or runnings back and forth" which often appear at the choice-point and which all rat-runners have noted, but few
have paid further attention to... Professor Muenzinger and his students have also been keeping records
of it in rats and that they have called it "vicarious trial and error"- or, more briefly, VTE.
p.361 I shall postulate that VTE’s always aid the learning
which they accompany. In the sole case, that of the difficult discrimination, where the poorer learning was accompanied
by more VTE’s I believe that this learning was nonetheless faster than it would have been if it had not been
for these greater VTE’s. And in all the other three experiments the greater VTE’s did accompany
the faster learning.
p.364 I believe that everything important in psychology
(except perhaps such matters as the building up of a super-ego, that is everything save such matters as involve society and
words) can be investigated in essence through the continued experimental and theoretical analysis of the determiners
of rat behavior at a choice-point in a maze.
p.364 So in closing let me borrow a verse written by Alexander Meiklejohn
in a copy of his book as he gave it me. He wrote, and I would now repeat:
To my ratiocinations
I hope you will be kind
As you follow up the wanderings
Of my amazed mind.
