Biographical Memoirs Volume 66 (1995) / Chapter Skim
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Kenneth Wartinbee Spence
Kenneth Wartinbee Spence
Pages 334-351
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From page 335... ...
Later at McGill University he injured his back cluring track competition and, as part of his therapy and convalescence, he went to live with his grandmother in LaCross, Wisconsin. He attended LaCross Teachers College and majored in physical education.
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From page 336... ...
With Walter Shipley he performed an experimental test of one of Hull's deductions concerning the clifficulty of blind alleys in maze learning in the rat. This led to other papers on maze learning which, as Hilgard writes, Spence published on the side while doing his dissertation on visual acuity in the chimpanzee.
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From page 337... ...
Although his name and Hull's appeared together on a paper just once, in a methodological article in 1938 dealing with the differences between correction and non-correction procedures in maze learning, their names are usually linked to identify the most influential neobehavioristic theory of the 1940s and 1950s that encompassed conditioning, learning, and motivation. Spence's contribution to this theory was explicitly acknowledged by Hull in the preface to Principles of Behavior,3 but it can also be inferred from the level of correspondence maintained by the two men.
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From page 338... ...
This point of view, offered in classrooms and privately on many occasions, was that these impediments lay within the discipline of psychology itself in the holists en c} the humanists, particularly, who ranted against artificial laboratory situations, and in the practitioners (the clinicians, mainly) who were beginning to dominate the American Psychological Association and were generally disdainful of theoretical-experimental psychology and paid little if any attention to its findings.
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From page 339... ...
As is the case in the work of so many distinguished scientists, this early work of Spence's, a product of his time at the Orange Park Primate Laboratories, was, as we shall see, the focus of much of the research in the Iowa laboratory in the 1940s, and it will remain perhaps his most influential. Spence's more formal, theoretical contributions to the study of learning and motivation are summarized in his Silliman lectures at Yale University, published as Behavior Theory and Conditioning (1956~.
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From page 340... ...
As we thought about it, however, we saw that this was a topic he carried over from his early work on vision and on theories of discrimination learning in the chimpanzee. It reemerged at Iowa in the 1940s in the work surrounding the two major theoretical issues, to which ~ have already alluded, that Spence brought to Iowa from his work at the Orange Park laboratories.
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From page 341... ...
These experiments showed that, even without any apparent learning, presolution discrimination training retarded solution in the reversal phase, proving that excitatory and inhibitory potentials had been building up to the two stimuli in the presolution phase even though these were subthreshold for response evocation and were not reflected in discriminative behavior. According to Spence the insight pro
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From page 342... ...
In light of this interest in perception and its relation to discrimination in animals, Spence always insisted that his theory of discrimination learning was a theory about inarticulate organisms and should not be applied directly to humans (sometimes with an aside that perhaps college freshmen, frequently the subjects in psychological research, might be an exception)
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From page 343... ...
From about 1950 on, almost all of Spence's own research papers involved human subjects and involved classical (PavIovian) eyeblink conditioning.
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From page 344... ...
This is particularly clear in the fact that, as we have seen, a substantial part of his work, particularly in the 1950s, had as its major purpose the separation of habit and motivational or drive factors in the eyeblink conditioning experiment. Some of his work involved the concept of level of anxiety, defined by a subset of items taken from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory that became known as the Manifest Anxiety Scale.
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From page 345... ...
, when he was the most cited psychologist in a survey of fourteen journals judged to be the most prestigious in the field.~3 In any account of his intellectual history one must not overlook, and cannot overestimate, another facet of Kenneth Spence's contribution the seventy-five doctoral students who came out of his laboratories, a large number of whom have gone on to make significant contributions of their own. TEACHING As head of the Department of Psychology at Iowa, which he became in 1942 following the untimely death of John A
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From page 346... ...
At one of the first meetings of the newly formed Psychonomic Society (T think in Chicago in 1961) , Kenneth said to me, "I hear you have reviewed Mowrer's book." (Spence hac3 some theoretical differences with 0.
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From page 347... ...
He received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association the first year it was awarded. (The story goes that this APA award was created, in part at least, to honor Spence after he had been urged to run for its presidency four or five times and, not having been elected, refused to run again.)
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From page 348... ...
A personality scale of manifest anxiety. journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 48:285-90 (1953~.
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From page 349... ...
44:430-44. 1938 Gradual versus sudden solution of discrimination problems of chimpanzees.
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From page 350... ...
New Haven: Yale University Press. 1958 A theory of emotionally based drive (D)
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From page 351... ...
7:642-48. Cognitive and drive factors in the extinction of the conditioned eyeblink in human subjects.
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