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In his 1948 address to the Division of Theoretical-Experimental Psychology of the American Psychological Association, Kenneth W. Spence discussed six distinctions between cognitive and stimulus-response (S-R) theories of learning. In this article, I first review these six distinctions and then focus on two of them in the context of my own research. This research concerns the specification of stimulus-stimulus associations in associative learning and the characterization of the neural systems underlying those associations. In the course of describing Spence's views and my research, I hope to communicate some of the richness of Spence's S-R psychology and its currency within modern scientific analyses of behavior.
Spence (1948; 1950, p. 161) characterized cognitive theories of learning as those that "emphasized the formation and modification of cognitive patterns representative of the relationships in the environment." For the most part, within these theories, such as those of Koffka (1935), Kohler (1940), Lewin (1936), andTolman (1932), learning was construed as part of a larger problem of perceptual organization and reorganization with experience. By contrast, stimulus-response (S-R) theories, such as those of Guthrie (1935), Hull (1943), Spence (1936), and Thoradike (1898), emphasized such constructs as habits and S-R bonds, which referred to hypothetical learning states or intervening variables. S-R theories provided rules relating stimulus factors, such as reward magnitude, number, and timing, to the strengths of those intervening variables and rules relating those variables to empirical response measures. On the whole, Spence saw few points of disagreement between these two theoretical positions and attributed most of the dissension between the camps to misinterpretation of S-R theory by cognitive theorists. From my perspective, the tone conveyed in his article was that of a patient teacher pointing out the mistakes of well-intentioned but misguided students of cognition, but without sparing the somewhat-less-pervasive (in his eyes) mistakes of S-R theorists.
I. Six Distinctions Between Cognitive and S-R Theories
Metaphors: Map control rooms versus telephone switchboards. Perhaps because spatial-learning tasks provided an important test arena for early cognitive and S-R psychologists, cognitive theories of learning became associated with the metaphor of "map control rooms," in which spatial representations and relations were acquired, computed, and exploited. By contrast, S-R theories became attached to the analogy of "telephone switchboards," by which stimulus inputs were, through...