Reciprocal heuristics: A discussion of the relationship of the study of learned behavior in laboratory and field

At the turn of the century, the initiators of laboratory study of animal learning advocated two very different approaches to the subject matter. Willard Small favored the investigation of learning in ecological settings appropriate to individual species. E. L. Thorndike treated the process of association formation in animals as a general one, best studied in situations distant from those to which subject species were adapted. The latter view …