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.
Thus, Guthrie’s one law of learning was the law of contiguity which states that when a combination of stimuli has been accompanied by the occurrence of movement, it tends to be followed by the recurrence of movement patterns. It does not deal about the concept of confirmatory waves and reinforcement of pleasant effects. He explained that by doing last in a situation will also tend to deal with the recurrence of situation.
In the year 1959, Guthrie revised the law of contiguity that tells about “What is being noticed about that becomes an approachable signal for what is being done”. This is the way of Guthrie’s hypothesis that an organism is targeted to different kinds of stimuli at any given time that it does not form any type of associations with each of them. Infact, the organism responds to a small proportion of stimuli that becomes associated with whatever response has been made.