The evolution of beasts and babies: Recapitulation, instinct, and the early discourse on child development

In 2009 American Psychologist published the account of an attempt to identify the infant "Albert B.," who participated in Watson and Rayner's study of the conditioning of human fears. Such literal interpretations of the question "Whatever happened to Little Albert?" highlight the importance of historical writing that transcends the narrowly biographical and that avoids the obsessive hunt for "facts." The author of a 1979 study of how secondary sources have told the story of Little Albert relates his attempts to purge incorrect accounts of that story from college textbooks. He renounces such efforts as misguided and suggests that myths in the history of psychology can be instructive, including the myth that the identity of Little Albert has been discovered.

Section: More Recent Telling Of the Albert Talementioning

confidence: 99%

Letting go of little Albert: Disciplinary memory, history, and the uses of myth

Harris

2011

“…This ambition for a Cornell monkey colony was unrealized, since Zimmermann left Cornell for University of Montana in 1966. However, Gibson and Walk benefited from Zimmermann's time in Ithaca; he was able to provide them with monkey subjects, presumably of interest because of their similarities to humans (Noon, ).…”

Section: The Choice Of Animal Subjectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Visual Cliff's Forgotten Menagerie: Rats, Goats, Babies, and Myth‐making in the History of Psychology

Rodkey¹

2015

Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk's famous visual cliff experiment is one of psychology's classic studies, included in most introductory textbooks. Yet the famous version which centers on babies is actually a simplification, the result of disciplinary myth-making. In fact the visual cliff's first subjects were rats, and a wide range of animals were tested on the cliff, including chicks, turtles, lambs, kid goats, pigs, kittens, dogs, and monkeys. The visual cliff experiment was more accurately a series of experiments, employing varying methods and a changing apparatus, modified to test different species. This paper focuses on the initial, nonhuman subjects of the visual cliff, resituating the study in its original experimental logic, connecting it to the history of comparative psychology, Gibson's interest in comparative psychology, as well as gender-based discrimination. Recovering the visual cliff's forgotten menagerie helps to counter the romanticization of experimentation by focusing on the role of extrascientific factors, chance, complexity, and uncertainty in the experimental process.

“…As is typical of late nineteenth century discourse on difference, Galton and Osborn both characterized the mental capacities of women, children, and savage races as equally inferior (Shields, , ; Russett, ; Bederman, ; Noon, ), although in this case inferiority was equated with the possession of a well‐developed visualizing faculty, rather than with poor mental imagery ability.…”

Section: Interpreting Mental Imagerymentioning

confidence: 99%

THE BIOLOGIST AS PSYCHOLOGIST: HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN'S EARLY MENTAL ABILITY INVESTIGATIONS

Young¹

2012

In the early 1880s, biologist Henry Fairfield Osborn conducted some of the first questionnaire research in American psychology. This article details how he came to distribute Francis Galton's questionnaire on mental imagery in the United States, as well as how he altered it to suit his own burgeoning psychological research interests. The development and circulation of questionnaires at the very beginning of American scientific psychology, first by Osborn and later by G. Stanley Hall, is discussed in terms of the new psychology's often-overlooked methodological plurality. Further, Osborn's late nineteenth century interest in individual variation and group differences in mental imagery ability are discussed in relation to his pervasive educational and social concerns, as well as his eventual status as a prominent eugenicist in the twentieth century United States. This research into mental imagery ability foreshadows the eugenic-oriented intelligence testing that developed in the early twentieth century.