Thorndike Edward Lee

(1874 - 1949) - American psychologist and educator. The first job of T. 'Um animals' (1898) was an important milestone in the introduction of an objective method to study the process of learning. Placing the 'problem' boxes - the experimental devices of varying degrees of complexity - the experimental animals (cats, dogs and lower monkeys), T. fixed nature of their motor responses to it to get out of the box and get reinforcements reflex. Proceedings of the experiments and the results are displayed graphically in the form of curves on a re-ryh observed sample and the time spent. The nature of the curve (which he called 'learning curve') gave T. reason to assert that the animal acts by 'trial and errors and accidental success'. The whole process of learning was interpreted as a simple communication between the situations and movements. T. made a significant contribution to the problem of skills, has made a number of laws of learning ( 'the law of exercise', 'the law of effect', 'the law of readiness' and others), bearing, in his view, the universal' nature of. He denied a qualitative difference between animal and human skills. From mechanistically-biologizatorskih positions T. developed behavioral problems. He owns a series of works on the psychology of teaching arithmetic, algebra, language, reading. To quantify the level of mental development, he developed a system mentimetricheskih techniques (tests). Subsequently T. made some adjustments to the model of learning, recognized, in particular, the importance of the touch controls for education skills. However, remaining true to the principle of biologically determined human behavior, T. defended the reactionary views on intellectual development of man. Research T. give grounds to assert that he had prepared the emergence of behaviorism.