Controlling Away the Phenomenon: Maze Research and the Nature of Learning

Abstract

Following maze research in animal behavior studies through the twentieth century, I explore “control” as an extended historical process involving the successive stabilization or removal of bits and scraps of the world to arrive at the pure form of a phenomenon of interest. Early behaviorist investigation of maze learning aimed to strip environmental cues from maze design to study context-free learning. Exemplifying this tendency is the famous 1907 “Kerplunk” experiment of Watson and Carr, in which they concluded that rats could ultimately learn a maze as one long bodily response unspooling in a successive series of actions, rather than basing their movement through the maze on external sensory stimuli. Supporting this context-free research program was a conceptual understanding of learning as something singular and general. With later, more ecological, accounts of animal behavior, however, it was argued that these early control practices had nullified the rich interrelation between organism and environment that makes advanced learning possible. The result was a deflated and distorted understanding of animal learning. Researchers had, in short, controlled away the phenomenon. This case highlights the tension between the object of inquiry and the object of control, and illustrates how novelty emerges in reinterpreting as central to the phenomenon of interest that which was previously merely interference.