Recent from talks
Winthrop Kellogg
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
Winthrop Kellogg
Winthrop Niles Kellogg (April 13, 1898 – June 22, 1972) was an American comparative psychologist who studied the behavior of a number of intelligent animal species.
Winthrop Niles Kellogg was born in 1898 in Mount Vernon, New York. He began undergraduate study in 1916 at Cornell University for one year before joining the Great War (World War I) in Europe. For two years he served as part of the American Expeditionary Forces in the US Army Air Service, earning him the prestigious Croix de Guerre. After the war, he returned to undergraduate study at Indiana University Bloomington. There he met Luella Dorothy Agger of Indianapolis, whom he would marry in 1920.
Kellogg graduated from Indiana in 1922 majoring in philosophy and psychology. Kellogg tried out several jobs, including a journalist, but was persuaded by Luella's uncle to have a go in academia. Kellogg followed this advice enrolling in the psychology program at Columbia University, where he would receive his Master's in 1927 and his doctorate just two years later in 1929. His doctorate was directed by Robert S. Woodworth and compared psychophysical methods. Even as a graduate student, Kellogg was a prolific researcher. He published four single-authored articles and one co-authored in 1928–29 in addition to his dissertation. He published an additional three articles in 1930 and another five in 1931. Kellogg sustained this level of activity throughout his academic career. This level of productivity likely aided in his hiring offer by Indiana soon after receiving his PhD.
At Indiana University Bloomington, Kellogg built a research laboratory for studying conditioned behavior in dogs. With help from colleagues and students, he established an extensive program to study the physiological and conditional responses of dogs with their cerebral cortex removed. The laboratory provided a great opportunity for students to get adequate training in experimental research and to work on specific research questions within a "well-defined research paradigm."
Kellogg was an innovative and creative spirit. He had a knack for designing new equipment, improving old equipment, creating new modes of data collection, and developing new surgical techniques". Among his publications, some concern these sorts of developments and technological innovation.
At Indiana University, Kellogg was involved in a very diverse set of research topics, which stemmed in part from student interest. Though he was involved in a great variety of topics, his research on conditioning and learning resulted in approximately 50 publications. Some of the topics within conditioning and learning that he pursued included "the bilateral transfer of conditioning...the effects of various drugs on learning...and spinal conditioning". Kellogg was an atheorist and used his conditioning studies to show that four different theories of learning: "trial-and-error learning, Gestalt insight, conditioning, and sign learning" were no different, and instead they were highlighting only parts of the whole situation of learning and argued that learning be defined as a function – a change in behavior – and not a structure – a change in the nervous system.
In the lab, Kellogg questioned whether dogs' transected spinal cords could exhibit a conditioned response "below the point of transsection". What he was looking for was a muscle twitch as the conditioned response in one of the exposed hamstring muscles. The twitch had been previously observed by Shurrager and Culler in 1940. Kellogg and his students could not produce any type of spinal conditioning and concluded that the twitch observed by Shurrager and Culler was just: "a basic response to a conditioned electric shock stimulus applied to another part of the body (either to another limb or to the tail) and that an unconditioned electric shock stimulus applied to the limb in question was unnecessary. It was argued further that changes in this muscle twitch with training should be regarded simply as sensitization of a reflex".
Being the comparative psychologist he was, he conducted what is believed to be the "first experimental study of learning by snakes". In 1936 he published "A Description of Maze Learning by Water Snakes…".
Hub AI
Winthrop Kellogg AI simulator
(@Winthrop Kellogg_simulator)
Winthrop Kellogg
Winthrop Niles Kellogg (April 13, 1898 – June 22, 1972) was an American comparative psychologist who studied the behavior of a number of intelligent animal species.
Winthrop Niles Kellogg was born in 1898 in Mount Vernon, New York. He began undergraduate study in 1916 at Cornell University for one year before joining the Great War (World War I) in Europe. For two years he served as part of the American Expeditionary Forces in the US Army Air Service, earning him the prestigious Croix de Guerre. After the war, he returned to undergraduate study at Indiana University Bloomington. There he met Luella Dorothy Agger of Indianapolis, whom he would marry in 1920.
Kellogg graduated from Indiana in 1922 majoring in philosophy and psychology. Kellogg tried out several jobs, including a journalist, but was persuaded by Luella's uncle to have a go in academia. Kellogg followed this advice enrolling in the psychology program at Columbia University, where he would receive his Master's in 1927 and his doctorate just two years later in 1929. His doctorate was directed by Robert S. Woodworth and compared psychophysical methods. Even as a graduate student, Kellogg was a prolific researcher. He published four single-authored articles and one co-authored in 1928–29 in addition to his dissertation. He published an additional three articles in 1930 and another five in 1931. Kellogg sustained this level of activity throughout his academic career. This level of productivity likely aided in his hiring offer by Indiana soon after receiving his PhD.
At Indiana University Bloomington, Kellogg built a research laboratory for studying conditioned behavior in dogs. With help from colleagues and students, he established an extensive program to study the physiological and conditional responses of dogs with their cerebral cortex removed. The laboratory provided a great opportunity for students to get adequate training in experimental research and to work on specific research questions within a "well-defined research paradigm."
Kellogg was an innovative and creative spirit. He had a knack for designing new equipment, improving old equipment, creating new modes of data collection, and developing new surgical techniques". Among his publications, some concern these sorts of developments and technological innovation.
At Indiana University, Kellogg was involved in a very diverse set of research topics, which stemmed in part from student interest. Though he was involved in a great variety of topics, his research on conditioning and learning resulted in approximately 50 publications. Some of the topics within conditioning and learning that he pursued included "the bilateral transfer of conditioning...the effects of various drugs on learning...and spinal conditioning". Kellogg was an atheorist and used his conditioning studies to show that four different theories of learning: "trial-and-error learning, Gestalt insight, conditioning, and sign learning" were no different, and instead they were highlighting only parts of the whole situation of learning and argued that learning be defined as a function – a change in behavior – and not a structure – a change in the nervous system.
In the lab, Kellogg questioned whether dogs' transected spinal cords could exhibit a conditioned response "below the point of transsection". What he was looking for was a muscle twitch as the conditioned response in one of the exposed hamstring muscles. The twitch had been previously observed by Shurrager and Culler in 1940. Kellogg and his students could not produce any type of spinal conditioning and concluded that the twitch observed by Shurrager and Culler was just: "a basic response to a conditioned electric shock stimulus applied to another part of the body (either to another limb or to the tail) and that an unconditioned electric shock stimulus applied to the limb in question was unnecessary. It was argued further that changes in this muscle twitch with training should be regarded simply as sensitization of a reflex".
Being the comparative psychologist he was, he conducted what is believed to be the "first experimental study of learning by snakes". In 1936 he published "A Description of Maze Learning by Water Snakes…".