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Artificial organisms as tools for the development of psychological theory: Tolman’s lesson

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Abstract

In the 1930s and 1940s, Edward Tolman developed a psychological theory of spatial orientation in rats and humans. He expressed his theory as an automaton (the “schematic sowbug”) or what today we would call an “artificial organism.” With the technology of the day, he could not implement his model. Nonetheless, he used it to develop empirical predictions which tested with animals in the laboratory. This way of proceeding was in line with scientific practice dating back to Galileo. The way psychologists use artificial organisms in their work today breaks with this tradition. Modern “artificial organisms” are constructed a posteriori, working from experimental or ethological observations. As a result, researchers can use them to confirm a theoretical model or to simulate its operation. But they make no contribution to the actual building of models. In this paper, we try to return to Tolman’s original strategy: implementing his theory of “vicarious trial and error” in a simulated robot, forecasting the robot’s behavior and conducting experiments that verify or falsify these predictions.

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Notes

  1. The program and the source code is written in Java. It can be downloaded from http://www.laral.istc.cnr.it/gigliotta/onisco.htm.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Relational Sciences, University of Naples “Federico II”, Naples, Italy

    Orazio Miglino

  2. Institute of the Sciences and Technologies of Knowledge, National Research Council, Rome, Italy

    Orazio Miglino & Onofrio Gigliotta

  3. Department of Psychology and Interdepartmental Centre of Knowledge Technologies, University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy

    Onofrio Gigliotta & Maurizio Cardaci

  4. Department of Linguistics, University of Calabria, Cosenza, Italy

    Michela Ponticorvo

Authors
  1. Orazio Miglino
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  2. Onofrio Gigliotta
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  3. Maurizio Cardaci
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  4. Michela Ponticorvo
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Michela Ponticorvo.

Appendix 1

Appendix 1

Source code of the main java class used to simulate the sowbug.

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Miglino, O., Gigliotta, O., Cardaci, M. et al. Artificial organisms as tools for the development of psychological theory: Tolman’s lesson. Cogn Process 8, 261–277 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-007-0178-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-007-0178-7

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