Edward Tolman: Biography and Study of Cognitive Maps

Edward C. Tolman was the initiator of purposeful behaviorism and a key figure for the introduction of cognitive variables in behavioral models.

Even if the study of cognitive maps is Tolman's best known contribution, this author's theory is much broader and was a true turning point in scientific psychology.

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Biography of Edward Tolman

Edward Chace Tolman was born in Newton, Massachusetts in 1886. Despite the fact that his father wanted him to continue the family business, Tolman decided to study electrochemistry; however, after reading William James he discovered his vocation for philosophy and psychology, a discipline to which he would end up dedicating himself.

He graduated in Psychology and Philosophy from Harvard. Shortly afterwards he moved to Germany to continue his training on his way to a doctorate. There he studied with Kurt Koffka; through him he became acquainted with the Gestalt psychology, which analyzed perception by focusing on the overall experience rather than the individual elements.

Back at Harvard, Tolman investigated nonsense syllable learning under Hugo Münsterberg, a pioneer of applied and organizational psychology. He earned his Ph.D. with a thesis on retroactive inhibition., a phenomenon that consists of the interference of the new material in the recovery of previously learned memories.

After being expelled from Northwestern University, where he worked as a teacher for three years, for publicly opposing American intervention in World War I, Tolman began teaching at the University of Berkeley in California. There he spent the rest of his career, from 1918 until his death in 1959.

Theoretical contributions to Psychology

Tolman was one of the first authors to study the cognitive processes from the framework of behaviorism; Although he was based on behavioral methodology, he wanted to show that animals could learn information about the world and use it flexibly, and not just automatic responses to environmental stimuli determined.

Tolman conceptualized cognitions and other mental contents (expectations, objectives ...) as intervening variables that mediate between the stimulus and the response. The organism is not understood as passive, in the manner of the classical behaviorism, but actively manages the information.

This author was especially interested in the intentional aspect of behavior, that is, in goal-oriented behavior; thus his proposals are categorized as "purposeful behaviorism".

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The E-E and E-R learning models

In the mid-20th century there was a deep debate within the behaviorist orientation around the nature of conditioning and the role of reinforcement. Thus, they opposed the Stimulus-Response (E-R) model, personified in authors such as Thorndike, Guthrie or Hull, and the Stimulus-Stimulus (E-E) paradigm, of which Tolman was the most representative important.

According to the E-E model, learning is produced by the association between a conditioned stimulus and an unconditioned one, which starts to evoke the same conditioned response in the presence of reinforcement; Instead, from the E-R perspective, it was argued that learning consists of association between a conditioned stimulus and a conditioned response.

Thus, Tolman and related authors considered that learning depends on the subject detecting the relationship between two stimuli, which will allow them to obtain a reward or avoid a punishment, compared to the representatives of the E-R model, who defined learning as the acquisition of a conditioned response to the appearance of a previously stimulus unconditioned.

From the E-R paradigm, a mechanistic and passive vision of the behavior of living beings was proposed, while the E-E model affirmed that the role of the learner is active since it implies a component from voluntary cognitive processing, with a specific goal.

Latent learning experiments

Hugh Blodgett had studied latent learning (which does not manifest as an immediately observable response) through experiments with rats and mazes. Tolman developed his famous proposal on cognitive maps and much of the rest of his work from this concept and the works of Blodgett.

In Tolman's initial experiment three groups of rats were trained to run through a maze. In the control group the animals got food (reinforcement) at the end; On the other hand, the rats of the first experimental group only got the reward from the seventh day of training, and those of the second experimental group from the third day.

Tolman found that the error rate of rats in the control group decreased from day one, while those of the experimental groups did so abruptly after the introduction of the food. These results suggested that the rats learned the path in all cases, but only reached the end of the maze if they hoped to get reinforcement.

Thus, this author he theorized that the execution of a behavior depends on the expectation of obtaining reinforcementor, but that nevertheless the learning of said behavior can take place without the need for a reinforcement process to take place.

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The study of cognitive maps

Tolman proposed the concept of cognitive maps to explain the results of his and Blodgett's experiments. According to this hypothesis, rats constructed mental representations of the maze during training sessions without the need for reinforcement, and thus they knew how to get there when it made sense.

The same would happen to people in everyday life: when we repeat a route frequently, we learn the location of a large number of buildings and places; however, we will only address these if it is necessary to achieve a certain goal.

To demonstrate the existence of cognitive maps Tolman did another experiment similar to the previous one, but in which after the rats learned the route of the labyrinth it was filled with water. Despite this, the animals managed to reach the place where they knew they would find food.

In this way he confirmed that rats they did not learn to execute a chain of muscular movements, as defended by the theorists of the E-R paradigm, but rather that cognitive variables were necessary, or at least not observable, to explain the learning they had acquired, and the response used to achieve the objective it could vary.