The relation which Skinner has with rats and Thorndike has with cats, same…
2018
The relation which Skinner has with rats and Thorndike has with cats, same relation Kohler has with —
- A.
dogs
- B.
hens
- C.
monkeys
- D.
chimpanzees
Attempted by 8 students.
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: D
Concept: Several early-20th-century learning-theory researchers are each remembered for landmark experiments conducted on one particular animal species — the species pairs uniquely with the researcher and the school of thought their experiments established.
Application: Thorndike's puzzle-box experiments (trial-and-error learning, the Law of Effect) used cats, and Skinner's operant-conditioning experiments (the Skinner box) used rats. Wolfgang Köhler, a Gestalt psychologist, ran his own landmark experiments on chimpanzees — most famously a chimpanzee named Sultan, who solved problems such as reaching a banana placed out of reach by stacking boxes or joining sticks. Köhler argued the chimpanzee reached the solution through sudden insight — perceiving the relationships in the whole situation — rather than blind trial and error. This makes chimpanzees the animal that completes the analogy for Köhler, just as rats complete it for Skinner and cats for Thorndike.
Cross-check: Checking the remaining options against their actual researcher-animal pairings rules each out:
Dogs pair with Ivan Pavlov's classical-conditioning (salivation-reflex) experiments, not with Köhler's.
Monkeys pair with Harry Harlow's attachment experiments (the wire-versus-cloth surrogate-mother studies), not with Köhler's.
Hens are not the signature subject of any major learning-theory experiment in this set.
So chimpanzees is the option that correctly completes the analogy.