Section A
One of the most eminent of psychologists, Clark Hull, claimed
that the essence of reasoning lies in the putting together of two "behavior
segments" in some novel way, never actually performed before, so as to reach a
goal. Two followers of Clark Hull, Howard and Tracey Kendler,
devised a test for children that was explicitly based on Hulll’s principles. The
children were given the task of learning to operate a machine so as to get a
toy. In order to succeed they had to go through a two-stage sequence. The
children were trained on each stage separately. The stages consisted merely of
pressing the correct one of two buttons to get a marble; and of inserting the
marble into a small hole to release the toy. The Kendlers found that the
children could learn the separate bits readily enough. But they did not for the
most part "integrate". They did not press the button to get the marble and then
proceed without further help to use the marble to get the toy. So the Kendlers
concluded that they were incapable of deductive reasoning. The
mystery at first appears to deepen when we learn, from anther psychologist,
Michael Cole and his colleagues, that adults in an African culture apparently
cannot do the Kendlers’ task either. But it lessens, on the other hand, when we
learn that a task was devised which was strictly analogous to the Kendlers’ one
but much easier for me African males to handle. Instead of the
button-pressing machine, Cole used a locked box and two differently colored
match-boxes, one of which contained a key that would open the box. Notice
that there are still two behavior segments--"open the right match-box to get the
key" and "use the key to open the box"---so the task seems formally to be the
same. But psychologically it is quite different. Now the subject is dealing not
with a strange machine but with familiar meaningful objects: and it is clear to
him what he is meant to do. It then turns our that the difficulty of
"integration" is greatly reduced. Recent work by Simon Hewson is
of great interest here for it shows that, for young children, too, the
difficulty lies not in the inferential processes which the task demands, but in
certain perplexing features of the apparatus and the procedure. Hewson made two
crucial changes. First, he replaced the button-pressing mechanism in the side
panels by drawers in these panels which the children could open and shut. This
took away the mystery from the first stage of training. Then he helped the child
to understand that there was no "magic" about the specific marble. The two
modifications together produced a jump m success rates from 30% to 90% for
five-year-olds and from 35% to 72.5 % for four-year-olds. For three-year-olds,
for reasons that are still in need of clarification, no improvement--rather a
slight drop in performance resulted from the change. We may
conclude, then, that children experience very real difficulty when faced with
the Kendler apparatus; but this difficulty cannot be taken as proof that they
are incapable of deductive reasoning. The Kendlers trained their subjects separately in the two stages of their experiment, but not in how to ______ the two actions.