Relate Thorndike’s connectionism to the older philosophical notion of association.
Thorndike termed his approach of experimental analysis towards the association studies as connectionism. In order to analyze the mind of a human he found the connections of changing power between a) circumstances, elements of circumstances and compounds of circumstances, b) reactions, willingness to react, directions of reactions, inhibitions and facilitations.
This point was a direct expansion of the older notion of the philosophy of association, however, with an essential difference. Rather than discussing about connections or associations among ideas, he was handling the connections among detachably verifiable reactions and situations.
Though Thorndike established his theory in a more detached reference frame, he continuously invoked the processes of mind. He discussed of discomfort, satisfaction and annoyance while talking about animals’ behavior under experiments, terms which are less behavioristic than mentalistic.
Therefore, Thorndike withheld the influence of Morgan and Romanes. His detached experiments of behaviors of animals usually included the judgments which were subjective about the supposed conscious actions of animals.
It can be noted that, Thorndike did not openly grant higher levels of intelligence and consciousness to animals. There is a steady decrease in the significance of the consciousness in psychology of animals from the beginning to the time of Thorndike as well as an elevation in the experimental analysis for behavioral studies.