ABSTRACT
In the late 1940’s there was a resurgence of nativistic thinking in American comparative psychology in which the classical behavior pattern, maternal behavior in the rat, became a battleground for contending theoretical viewpoints. The nativistic position was expounded by C.P. Stone and others and was based upon studies in which nulliparous female rats, isolated from other animals during their development, nevertheless exhibited maternal behavior at their first delivery and went on to successfully rear their litters. In response to the nativist formulation, Schneirla and his student Birch, proposed that nativists often overlooked an important source of experience, namely, self-stimulation, which might play a role even when animals were isolated from other kinds of externally-derived experience. The concept of self-stimulation was joined to an earlier concept of trophallaxis that had been proposed by Schneirla (1951) as the basis of all social behavior. Schneirla defined trophallaxis, according to Wheeler (1928), with respect to insect colony relations, as “a more or less widespread process of mutual stimulation and responsiveness among all members of the colony, underlying both colony unity and colony organization” (Schneirla, 1951, Pg. 87), and applied the concept to the early interaction between the mother and newborn among the mammals: “The influence of the trophallactic factors begins to be exerted in the earliest relations between the mother and newborn infant, which progressively become specialized and elaborated in the social situation according to its makeup.” (Schneirla, 1951, pp. 87 – 88).
