Did Guthrie accept or reject the law of frequency? Explain.
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 accepted Aristotle’s law of contiguity and the laws of frequency. Hull, Tolman and Skinner believed that associative strength could be increased by the rapid exposure to the learning environment. They disagreed that an increase in associative strength takes place that agreed with the exposure of frequency. By these phenomena, Guthrie rejected the law of frequency in a more hypothetical manner.
Guthrie postulated about the rejection of the law of frequency by stating that a stimulus pattern achieves its full strength of association by pairing with its first encounter of response behavior. So, he propounded the theory of one-trial learning that majorly described about the process of learning that can resulted from one’s own experience.