• DOI:10.1037/H0061626
• Corpus ID: 42496633

Cognitive maps in rats and men.

@article{Tolman1948CognitiveMI,
  title={Cognitive maps in rats and men.},
  author={Edward Chace Tolman},
  journal={Psychological review},
  year={1948},
  volume={55 4},
  pages={
          189-208
        }
}

• E. Tolman
• Published 1 July 1948
• Psychology, Biology
• Psychological review

I shall devote the body of this paper to a description of experiments with rats. But I shall also attempt in a few words at the close to indicate the significance of these findings on rats for the clinical behavior of men. Most of the rat investigations, which I shall report, were carried out in the Berkeley laboratory. But I shall also include, occasionally, accounts of the behavior of non-Berkeley rats who obviously have misspent their lives in out-of-State laboratories. Furthermore, in reporting our Berkeley experiments I shall have to omit a very great many. The ones I shall talk about were carried out by graduate students (or underpaid research assistants) who, supposedly, got some of their ideas from me. And a few, though a very few, were even carried out by me myself. Let me begin by presenting diagrams for a couple of typical mazes, an alley maze and an elevated maze. In the typical experiment a hungry rat is put at the entrance of the maze (alley or elevated), and wanders about through the various true path segments and blind alleys until he finally comes to the food box and eats. This is repeated (again in the typical experiment) one trial every 24 hours and the animal tends to make fewer and fewer errors (that is, blindalley entrances) and to take less and less time between start and goal-box until finally he is entering no blinds at all and running in a very few seconds from start to goal. The results are usually presented in the form of average curves of blind-entrances, or of seconds from start to finish, for groups of rats. All students agree as to the facts. They disagree, however, on theory and explanation. (1) First, there is a school of animal psychologists which believes that the maze behavior of rats is a matter of mere simple stimulus-response connections. Learning, according to them, consists in the strengthening of some of these connections and in the weakening of others. According to this ‘stimulus-response’ school the rat in progressing down the maze is helplessly responding to a succession of external stimulisights, sounds, smells, pressures, etc. impinging upon his external sense organs-plus internal stimuli coming from the viscera and from the skeletal muscles. Figure 1: Plan of maze 14-Unit T-Alley Maze. (From M.H. Elliot, The effect of change of reward on the maze performance of rats. University of California Publications in Psychology, 1928, 4, 20.)