ABSTRACT
The scientific study of the psychology of learning originated in the late nineteenth century in three very different parts of the world. In Russia the great physiologist, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov turned from work on digestion to the investigation of classically conditioned reflexes; in America, Edward Lee Thorndike did his early studies of animal intelligence that were somewhat complex versions of what later came to be called instrumental or operant conditioning; in Germany, Hermann Ebbinghaus invented the nonsense syllable and began his self-inflicted studies of human verbal learning and memory. In this chapter we shall review the history that grew out of the first two of these contributions. Chapter 3 describes the history that began with Ebbinghaus.
