THE DEMISE OF UNIVERSAL LEARNING

Through the mid-twentieth cen­tury, American psychology paid little attention to special capacities of indi­vidual species. Under the influence of behaviorists like John Watson, B. F. Skinner, and Clark Hull, behavior came to be understood as dependent on what organisms learned from their experiences. For behaviorists, learning was a universal capacity that worked more or less the same regardless of which an­imal was doing the learning and what was being learned. If one wanted to understand how humans learn language, math, telephone numbers, tennis, or what someone looks like, studies of the way that key-pecking in a pigeon or bar-pressing in a rat was reinforced by food were just as valid as anything else. [dc: this is the “democracy of behaviorism.”]…

…The [behavioristic]plain vanilla view of learning was also challenged when animal psy­chologists in the 1960s began to realize that the behaviorists’ “law of learning” didn’t apply to all forms of learning. For example, John Garcia’s discovery that some stimuli (those that make you sick to your stomach) can be associated with tastes, but not with sounds or sights, was inconsistent with the behav­iorist notion that any given stimulus could be associated with any other one, though it makes perfect sense from a biological point of view. This and other findings suggested that there might be biological constraints on learning, fac­tors that tailor the workings of the learning process to the specific learning. A universal learning mechanism was clearly not sufficient… (p. 83)

…The finding (Garcia’s “conditioned taste aversion” (CTA)) violated one of the cardinal principles of learning – that associations form between stimuli that occur at the same and not between stimuli separated by hours. The fact that CTA violated this law was one of the major challenges to the universal nature of learning promoted by the behaviorist. And because these data were viewed by strict behaviorists as impossible, Garcia had a great deal of trouble publishing his studies… (all emphases added) [dc: This in actuality reflects the “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” principle. Garcia’s CTA was an extraordinary claim because the mechanism that could produce this was unknown. Also is relevant to the “Burden of Proof” principle. Because Garcia’s findings went against what was strongly believed by informed people, he had the burden of proof. On the negative side, this shows how preformed biases can impede science.]