Additional Resources (LU1)

Chomsky's View on Behaviourism

While Noam Chomsky has rejected behaviorism, he pointed out that the aspects of it are important in modern cognitive sciences. Chomsky explains that behaviorism was abandoned due to further conclusions. For one, two of Skinner’s students who were animal trainers found that reinforcement in animals slowly deteriorate. They were training a pig a trick with food as reinforcement. Initially, the pig was getting better and better at the trick. However, the pig started to root more and ignored its training. This is called instinctual drift, which is the tendencies of animals to revert back to their natural behaviours. He follows up by refuting B.F Skinner’s pigeon experiment by explaining that the pigeons’ pecking was just modified versions of their natural behaviours. Chomsky shared Bill Brewer’s conclusion that reinforcement experiments work on animals only if the animals are aware of the experiment, otherwise, they will just continue their natural behaviours.