Karl Lashley (1890-1958) Was a Student of John Watson

Essay

Karl Lashley (1890-1958) was a student of John Watson. A more thorough scholar than Watson, Lashley is best known for his attempts to find the engram, the physical basis of memory. He used rats, brain extirpation, and mazes in many of his experiments. For these studies, he always included a sham operated group as a control-animals that were anesthetized, cut open, and then sewed up without damaging any brain tissue. For your problem, consider 18 rats, half of which were assigned to the frontal lobe group and half to the occipital lobe group. In each group one-third was given the sham operation, one-third had 20 percent of the lobe removed and one-third had 60 percent removed. Suppose that 30 days later all rats learned a Lashley Type III maze, which is fairly complicated. The number of errors of the animals in each group were:Frontal-0%: 18, 10, 15; Frontal-20%: 20, 12, 16; Frontal-60%: 35, 28, 30; Occipital-0%: 19, 12, 14; Occipital- 20%: 25, 20, 19; Occipital-60%: 63, 49, 57. Analyze these results.