Thorndike proposed that use strengthens stimulus-response connections and disuse weakens them, then discarded the simple form.
Thorndike's 1898 companion to the law of effect. He later discarded the simple law of exercise after experiments showed that repetition alone does not reliably produce learning, which is exactly Ericsson's later point about deliberate practice.
In practice
- Thorndike later substantially retracted it: practice without feedback strengthens nothing.
- A trainee who has performed the same task four hundred times with no correction has four hundred repetitions of the same error.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation offered was strengthening by use, on the analogy of a path worn by walking. What replaced it is feedback: repetition with knowledge of results produces learning, and repetition without it does not.
- In its favour
- The idea that connections strengthen with use survives in modern accounts of synaptic change and in the spacing and retrieval literature, in a much more specified form.
- Against it
- Thorndike himself discarded the simple form after his own experiments showed repetition alone does not reliably produce learning, which is unusual and creditable, and the discarded version still circulates in training folklore.
- Standing
- Thorndike himself discarded the simple form after experiments showed repetition alone does not reliably produce learning.
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- A century and a half of measuring the mind