A consideration of some conceptual trends in comparative psychology.

Abstract

HAVE WE A COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY?One might say that ideally comparative psychology exists when the comparative methods of science are applied to psychological problems. This must have been, in part at least, what Wundt had in mind in writing his Vorlesungen . . . (181). Potentially, such a program would appear to offer a good basis for bringing together and integrating toodivergent fields such as animal, child, and social psychology. Of course this type of approach has not disappeared altogether from psychology, for in recent years we have had an American edition of Werner's Comparative Psychology of Mental Development (171), utilizing animal, child, cultural, and social evidence in dealing with common psychological problems, and there is developmental psychology (103) which offers a somewhat limited and loose kind of alliance of child and animal study. However, the pre-contemporary and contemporary trends have led us from such integrative advances, for the most part, undoubtedly in some measure because of the difficult and tenuous nature of extrapolations among these disciplines. On the whole, comparative psychology is currently regarded as contained by animal psychology. But the digestion and assimilation have been uneasy and incomplete at best.Although a sound use of the comparative method would be expected to unify and mutually strengthen all psychological fields having to do with problems of development, we have at the present time no articulate and integrated advance of the kind. One's strong impression is that no forward-looking program of the kind extends through animal psychology. Konrad Lorenz, the central figure in a vigorous contemporary group of European students of animal behavior, has commented as follows upon one symptom of our situation:1 The basis of a paper delivered by invitation at the symposium on Conceptual Trends in Psychology, annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in Chicago,

Mediation and Causality at the Individual Level

“…A classic example of this is the enormous number of experiments carried out to decide whether a model of sign learning, assuming cognitive representations, proposed by Tolman, or a model of S-R learning, proposed by Hull, best explained how rats learned to navigate a maze. The highly special experimental conditions they used are believed to have severely restricted the possibilities of generalization (Schneirla 1952). In fact, the conflicting results the two camps obtained might be explained by that the rats they used came from genetically different inbred strains 1 .…”

Jay S. Rosenblatt

“…This idea, tested well before its time, is reflected in more recent work called 'the constraints on learning.' Although Jay is most famous for his work on rat maternal behavior, which he started when he joined Danny Lehrman's new Institute of Animal Behavior in 1958, his first work on kittens (started in 1954 at the AMNH) really epitomizes his approach to the organization of behavior and the influence of Schneirla's Approach/Withdrawal theory (Schneirla, 1952;Schneirla & Rosenblatt, 1961), namely: that to understand development one must understand the transition between dependence on basic sensory-motor reflexes which occurs first, to the development of affectively based perceptual-motivational relations. Hence, through learning, simple responses to primary stimuli (thermal and tactile) that vary along the intensity dimension become approach or active withdrawal from affectively laden multimodal stimuli (often with the addition of olfactory information; Rosenblatt, 1971).…”

The three faces of Jay S. Rosenblatt

“…This idea, tested well before its time, is reflected in more recent work called 'the constraints on learning.' Although Jay is most famous for his work on rat maternal behavior, which he started when he joined Danny Lehrman's new Institute of Animal Behavior in 1958, his first work on kittens (started in 1954 at the AMNH) really epitomizes his approach to the organization of behavior and the influence of Schneirla's Approach/Withdrawal theory (Schneirla, 1952;, namely: that to understand development one must understand the transition between dependence on basic sensory-motor reflexes which occurs first, to the development of affectively based perceptual-motivational relations. Hence, through learning, simple responses to primary stimuli (thermal and tactile) that vary along the intensity dimension become approach or active withdrawal from affectively laden multimodal stimuli (often with the addition of olfactory information; Rosenblatt, 1971).…”