The Role of Associative Processes in Spatial, Temporal, and Causal Cognition

One of the great psychological debates of the twentieth century involved an exchange between Tolman and Guthrie. Tolman, originally a behaviorist himself, conducted experiments with rats that lead him to develop a nascent cognitive framework during the first half of the twentieth century—a period dominated by the S-R behaviorist ideology. He suggested that rats held expectations about impending events, rats could learn without explicit (i.e., food) reinforcement, and that rats formed cognitive maps while navigating a maze. Tolman was ridiculed by many of his colleagues for these heretical notions. Guthrie, one of behaviorism’s chief proponents, even accused Tolman of “leaving the rat buried in thought” (Guthrie, 1935, p. 172). Tolman planted the seed, however, that led to the cognitive revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. The cognitive framework finally found acceptance and hypotheses about mental states and cognitive processes in both humans and animals became commonplace. Today, the cognitive framework is the dominant ideological stance, though currents of behaviorism still exist. This is not to say that one framework, such as the cognitive, provides a more accurate depiction than the other, such as behaviorism. Rather, both frameworks continue to have heuristic value, and the tension between them epitomizes the The Role of Associative Processes in Spatial, Temporal, and Causal Cognition