Edward Thorndike

Edward Thorndike was an American psychologist. Who lived between 1884 and 1949. Thorndike titled his theory “Connectionism”. He derived this theory by using cats, puzzle box and food.

Edward Thorndike Perspective to Education

According to Thorndike, the fundamental of learning is the association between sense impressions and impulses to action (stimuli and responses). These associations become strengthened, or weakened by the nature and frequency of the stimuli-responses pairings. This means that an organism will repeat the behaviour if it obtains a pleasant or satisfying stimulus after first demonstrating it. He therefore postulated that learning in an organism involves the act of selecting the most appropriate response and associating it with specific problems or stimuli. Thorndike then described this type of theory as learning by “trial and error” or “trial and success”.

In arriving at this theory, a cat was put in a puzzle box, with food outside it. The logic was that the cat has to escape before it could get the food. There was a release mechanism inside which the cat would operate before it could get outside. In the process, the cat made a series of effort to get outside. Eventually, it succeeded in operating the mechanism, which paved way for its escape and obtaining the food.

On the subsequent attempt, the random movement was reduced, and the cat concentrated much on the direction of the release mechanism until it was able to escape again. The help of the “release mechanism” made it possible for the cat to succeed in its escape, hence this type of learning is also known as “instrumental conditioning”.