Edward Thorndike, an American psychologist, was a pioneer of experimental behaviorism. He broke new ground in designing devices such as puzzle boxes to study animal behavior. In these studies, he followed in Pavlov’s footsteps but interpreted the principle of conditioning differently. His experiments led to different conclusions for the theory of classical Pavlovian conditioning.
In a typical experiment with a mouse, a hungry cat was placed in a puzzle box with a simple lever inside. A bowl of food sat outside the box, and the time taken to find the lever and release the catch of the door was noted. Then the process was repeated, with the only difference being that the cat would move around the room freely instead of sitting quietly inside the box. Where Pavlov‘s work involved associating a neutral signal with stimuli, Thorndike‘s experiments were designed to study how an animal learns through trial and error and associated behavior to reward.
