PSY-35 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Rosalie Rayner, Little Albert Experiment, Classical Conditioning
Document Summary
John b. watson: key gure in the rise of behaviourism. As a response to the focus on introspection, he promoted a focus on behaviourism by extrapolating from the work of psychologists who were investigating learning in animals. Introspection: a procedure whereby trained subjects are asked to report on their conscious experiences. This was the principal method of study in early twentieth-century psychology. Because of his efforts, the dominant focus of psychology switched from thinking to learning. Behaviourism can be de ned as an approach that focused on observable behaviour rather than on consciousness. In his study of the digestive system, a dog was given meat powder to make it salivate. Before long, his assistants became aware that the dog began salivating when it saw the person who fed it. As the experiment continued, the dog began to salivate even earlier, when it heard the footsteps of its feeder.
