Natural Science 07 - Participants in science behave scientifically, Scientific ideas lead to ongoing research

Science is open to anyone (regardless of age, gender, religious commitment, physical ability, ethnicity, country of origin, political views, nearsightedness, favorite ice cream flavor) and benefits from the diversity of perspectives offered by its participants.

Behaving scientifically. Pay attention to what other people have already done. Expose your ideas to testing.

Assimilate the evidence. Openly communicate ideas and tests to others. Play fair: Act with scientific integrity.

Ernest Rutherford and his colleagues acted in ways that moved science forward: They understood the relevant knowledge in their field. Rutherford had studied physics for more than 20 years when he proposed the idea of the nucleus.

They exposed their ideas to testing. Even though his original view of the atom suggested that no backscattering should occur, Rutherford decided to look for backscattered alpha particles anyway, just to be thorough.

They assimilated the evidence. When their experimental results did not support the "snowball" model of the atom, instead of writing those results off as an anomaly, they modified their original ideas in light of the new evidence.

They openly communicated their ideas so that other physicists could test them as well. Rutherford published the experimental results, a description of his reasoning, and the idea of the nucleus in 1911 in a scientific journal.

They acted with scientific integrity. In his paper on the topic, Rutherford assigned credit fairly (citing the contributions of his colleagues, Geiger and Marsden) and reported his results honestly.citing

scientific journal Publication that contains firsthand reports of scientific research, often reviewed by experts.

scientific journal In these articles, scientists describe a study and any details one might need to evaluate that study — background information, data, statistical results, graphs, maps, explanations of how the study was performed and how the researchers interpreted their results, etc. To learn more, visit Publish or perish.Publish or perish

cite In science publishing, to give credit to the previous work of other scientists — usually through a list of references, or citations, at the end of a scientific article. Through citations, the scientific community expects its members to give credit to the ideas, techniques, and studies of other scientists that influenced or informed a particular investigation.

Is this science? Rats and cheese

Animal psychology Many people have wondered how other animals think and experience the world (e.g, is a dog really happy to see me or does he just want a treat?). How could we test an idea about how another animal thinks?

In the 1940s, psychologist Edward Tolman investigated a related question. He wanted to know how rats successfully navigate their surroundings — for example, a maze containing a hidden reward.

How do rats successfully navigate their surroundings — for example, a maze containing a hidden reward.

Tolman thought that rats would build mental maps of the maze as they investigated it (forming a mental picture of the layout of the maze).

Many other people thought that rats would learn to navigate the maze through stimulus- response, associating particular cues with particular outcomes (e.g., taking this tunnel means I get a piece of cheese) without forming any big picture of the maze.

Was Tolman investigating the natural world?

Natural world? The brains of rats and their workings are a part of the natural world, as is the behavior of rats.

Was Tolman trying to explain the natural world?

Aims to explain? Tolman aimed to explain how rats navigate their surroundings.

Were Tolmans’ ideas testable?

Testable ideas? The two ideas about how rats navigate (mental maps vs. stimulus-response) are testable, but figuring out how to test them required some clever and logical thinking about experimental design.

How would you test these ideas? In groups of three or four try to suggest how you could test this idea.

Tolman and his colleagues trained rats in a maze which offered them many different tunnels to enter first. One of the tunnels twisted and turned but consistently led to the reward, and the rats quickly learned to go down that tunnel.

Then the experimenters blocked the entrance to the reward tunnel. What would the rats do?

Tolman reasoned that if the rats were navigating with a mental map, then they would pick another tunnel that, according to their mental map of the maze, led in the direction of the food.

But if the rats were navigating by stimulus-response, then they would choose the tunnel closest to the original reward tunnel, regardless of where it led, since that was closest to the stimulus with the pay-off. Think about it.

Does Tolman rely on evidence to support his idea?

Relies on evidence? Tolman and his colleagues tested the mental map idea with several experiments, including the tunnel experiment described above.

In the experiment, most of the rats picked a tunnel that led in the direction of the food, instead of one close to the original reward tunnel. The evidence supported the idea that rats navigate using something like a mental map.

Did Tolman communicate with the scientific community?

Scientific community? Tolman published many papers on this topic in scientific journals in order to explain his experiments and the evidence relevant to them to other psychologists.

Did Tolman’s work lead to more ongoing research?

Ongoing research? This research is a small part of a much larger body of ongoing psychological research about how organisms learn and make decisions based on their representations of the world.

Did Tolman display scientific behavior?

Scientific behavior? Edward Tolman and his colleagues acted with scientific integrity and behaved in ways that push science forward. They accurately reported their results and allowed others to test their ideas.

Tolmann was trying to show that rats (and humans) weren’t just like machines that responded by stimulus and response. He thought that animals could learn the connections between stimuli and did not need any explicit biologically significant event to make learning occur. The rival theory, the much more mechanistic "S-R" (stimulus- response) reinforcement-driven view, was especially pushed by Clark L. Hull.

The influence of Tolman's ideas declined rapidly in the later 1950s and 1960s. However, his achievements had been considerable. His 1938 and 1955 papers, produced to answer Hull's charge that he left the rat "buried in thought" in the maze, unable to respond, anticipated and prepared the ground for much later work in cognitive psychology.

Tolman’s 1948 paper introduced the concept of a cognitive map, which has found extensive application in almost every field of psychology

Tolman was very concerned that psychology should be applied to try to solve human problems, and in addition to his technical publications, he wrote a book called Drives Toward War.

Tolman was one of the senior professors the University of California tried to dismiss in the McCarthyite era of the early 1950s, because he refused to sign a loyalty oath - not because of any lack of felt loyalty to the United States but because it infringed on academic freedom.

In cognitive psychology psychologists began to discover and apply decision theory - a stream of work that was recognized by the award of a Nobel prize to Daniel Kahneman in 2002.

Daniel Kahneman ia psychologist and winner of the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He is notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, behavioral economics and hedonic psychology.

Can you think of any ideas which people accept as true, but which you don’t think have been tested? Can you think of tests for these ideas?