In Guthrie’s theory, what is the function of maintaining stimuli? For example, how were these stimuli used to explain what other theorists called drives and intentions?
Edwin Ray Guthrie was born in Lincoln, Nebraska in the year 1886 and he was the first children among the five children. He was considered as a notable behaviorist that was fully disagreed with the theories of other behaviorists such as Tolman, Hull, Watson and Skinner containing subjective and obsolete like things. He believed that all phenomena of learning could better be explained by the Aristotle’s law of association.
Guthrie postulated the major approachable concept of view that are known as maintaining stimuli that has the ability to keep an organism fully active until a specific goal was not accomplished. It can be divided into internal stimuli such as hunger as well as external stimuli such as loud noise.
When an organism performs an act that ends the maintaining stimuli, that act becomes stereotypically associated with the maintaining stimuli. These acts are specifically known as intentions because they derive their goal by the removal of stimuli maintenance by the phenomena of drives. Guthrie explained the intentional behavior as other kind of behavior that surpasses the law of contiguity.