Edward Thorndike
(1874-1949)
Edward Thorndike was a psychologist at Teachers College, Columbia University, who was the first to apply psychology to the study of learning.
Thorndike developed what he called "laws of learning." His most famous he called the "law of effect." It led to the development of
operant conditioning as superior to
classical conditioning." Where classical conditioning depends on developing associations between events, operant conditioning involves learning from the consequences of our behavior. This led to the behaviorist theories of John B. Watson and B.F.Skinner, which was built on schedules of "reinforcement" of a behavior by following it with pleasant consequences. A behavior followed by unpleasant consequences is found to be reduced or stopped.
Thorndike's theories led to the modern idea of "
connectionism," that the brain consists of neural networks describable by mathematics and modelled by computer-based artificial neural networks that underlie today's
artificial intelligence or AI, as first seen by the pioneers
Warren McCulloch and
Waller Pitts in their 1942 article
"A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity.
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