Nelson-Denny Practice Test 13

Maps in the Mind

¹In the early twentieth century, many American psychologists held that learning consisted of strengthening connections between stimuli and responses. A rat in a maze, according to this view, learned nothing about the maze itself; it simply repeated the turns that had been followed by food. Reward was thought to be what made learning happen at all.

²Edward Tolman, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, doubted this account. In a well-known experiment, his research group let three groups of rats explore the same complex maze once a day. One group found food at the end of the maze every time. A second group never found food. A third group wandered the maze without reward for ten days and then, on the eleventh day, began to find food at the goal.

³The rewarded rats steadily made fewer errors, as expected, and the never-rewarded rats improved only slightly. The striking result came from the third group. Once food appeared, these rats quickly caught up, and within a day or two they were performing as well as the rats that had been rewarded all along. They could not have learned the correct route in a single trial. They must have been learning the layout of the maze during their apparently aimless days of exploring, without showing it.

⁴Tolman called this hidden knowledge latent learning, and he argued that the rats had formed a "cognitive map," an inner representation of the space around them. Reward, in his view, did not create the learning; it gave the animals a reason to display what they already knew. This distinction between learning and performance shaped later research on memory and thinking, and it helped prepare the way for the cognitive approach that came to dominate psychology in the second half of the century.