Yerkes, Robert Mearns - Theories
Theories
In a 1996 article, Dewsbury wrote that Yerkes was "arguably the most important comparative psychologist and psychobiologist of the [twentieth] century." Yerkes is, first and foremost, remembered for his success in establishing the study of nonhuman primates as a field of scientific research. He also made other important contributions to psychology, however, two of which are the Yerkes-Dodson law and major advances in intelligence testing.
Yerkes-Dodson law
Main points The Yerkes-Dodson law, as originally stated, relates the strength of a stimulus to the speed of avoidance learning. In their research with mice, Yerkes and Dodson used three levels of task difficulty: easy, medium, and hard. They also used three levels of stimulus strength: weak, intermediate, or strong. They found that, if the task was easy,...
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