214Originally posed in the context of an examination of the veracity of two different learning theories-one presented by Hull (1943), which emphasized the learning of motor responses, and the other outlined by Tolman (1948), which emphasized the learning of environmental configurations, often called cognitive maps-the question of whether response learning or place learning is more primitive has proved difficult to answer clearly.Tolman, Ritchie, and Kalish (1946) argued that they had provided a definitive answer to the question when they trained rats in a cross-maze located in a fixed place within a testing room and consisting of four arms radiating at 90º angles from a cross-point, as shown in Figure 1A. The ends of the two shorter opposing arms were designated as start boxes, depicted as S1 and S2 in Figure 1A, whereas the ends of the other two opposing and longer arms were designated as goal boxes, shown as G1 and G2 in Figure 1A. Rats were assigned to be either place learners or response learners. All the rats started from S1 or S2 on different randomly selected trials with either G1 or G2 baited with food. Place learners always found the food in one place (e.g., in G1) and had to make either left or right turns to get there, depending on the start point. Place learners were always required to go to their nonpreferred place, as determined by a preliminary test trial. Response learners had to make the same response (always a right turn) and, thus, found food in G1 when starting from S1 and in G2 when starting from S2. Oddly, in view of the use of a nonpreferred place for place learners, there was no similar attempt to control response preferences for response learners. Tolman et al. (1946) reported that all 8 place learners quickly reached a criterion of 10 correct trials in a row, whereas 5 of 8 response learners failed to reach the same criterion within 72 trials, and the 3 that did reach the criterion all took more trials than the slowest place learner. Tolman et al. interpreted these results as direct support for the hypothesis that learning to go to a particular place is easier than learning specific motor responses, such as turning right, and as indirect support for his cognitiveleaning theory.Blodgett, McCutchan, and Mathews (1949) noted that Tolman et al. (1946) may have inadvertently given place learners an unfair advantage because, in always going to one place-for example, to G2 in Figure 1A-they were also always going in a constant compass direction. By contrast, response learners were required to go in opposite compass directions on different trials. According to Blodgett et al., this confound between direction and place actually made it impossible to determine whether the results were due to a place-learning predisposition, a direction-learning predisposition, or both. Blodgett et al. (1949) exposed hungry rats to a T-maze and, by systematically varying the location and, sometimes, the orientation of the maze within the room and also varying which goalbox contained the food reward, were able to e...

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