[From Bruce Abbott (951128.1625 EST)]
Rick Marken (951128.1000) --
In answer to your title, yes: "controlled variable." There, I said it!
Bruce Abbott (951128.1140 EST)
1. What have we learned about the pigeon?
That a pigeon can vary it's actions appropriately in order to get fed.
And how is it able to do that in this experiment? It must learn to peck one
key if Herrnstein's girlfriend is in the picture, and the other key if she
is not. The pigeon was able to do this at least as accurately as a human
participant. Thus, the pigeon was able to recognize Herrnstein's girlfriend
in a picture, even though this is a two-dimensional representation of her
image and both the view of her and her appearance (how dressed, hairstyle,
etc.) varied widely from picture to picture, and even though many pictures
included other, similar-looking creatures with whom she might easily have
been confused. The pigeon was very unlikely to be responding to some simple
discriminative stimulus reliably associated with her appearance in the
picture, since one was not present. Very likely, the pigeon saw the images,
despite their considerable variation, as different views of the same
three-dimensional object.
2. What is the method used (control or IV-DV)?
Conventional IV-DV; not The Test type of IV-DV. There is no hypothesis about
what the pigeon might be controlling and no monitoring of that variable given
different types and amounts of disturbance. So you have learned nothing
about what variable(s) the pigeon is controlling (though you can glean some
hypotheses about what the pigeon is controlling; but these hypothesese must
be tested -- and, of coursed. they never are tested by conventional
researchers).
The question, my dear Marken, was whether the pigeon could learn to control
(maximize) its access to grain when doing so required it to perceive a
complexly varying visual pattern as the "same" object. It could. This
experiment revealed something of importance about the capabilities of the
pigeon's visual perception system.
3. Based on this result, did Herrnstein have any reason to consider
jumping out of the window of his Harvard office?
Of course not. He didn't know that he was observing a behavioral illusion;
like the rest of conventional psychology, he was happily ignorant of the
behavioral illusion. Unlike some behaviorists I know, who want to have their
conventinoal psychology and their PCT too, he didn't even have to
go into denial about it. And he managed to become relatively famous by
writing about this illusion as though it told us something about how behavior
works. And he had a girl friend (proving that there is someone for EVERYONE)!
I'm sure he (like Skinner) died a happy man.
What Herrnstein learned from this experiment was no "behavioral illusion,"
so he would have felt no need to jump out of his office window, even if he
had learned all about control. There's more to be learned from research
than what the controlled variable was.
The reference for this study is:
Herrnstein, R. J., Loveland, D. H., & Cable, C. (1976). Natural concepts in
pigeons. _Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes_,
_2_, 285-302.
Regards,
Bruce