Kenneth Spence

Kenneth Wartinbee Spence (May 6, 1907 – January 12,

1967) was a prominent American psychologist known for Kenneth Wartinbee Spence
both his theoretical and experimental contributions to Born May 6, 1907
learning theory and motivation. As one of the leading Chicago, Illinois, United States
theorists of his time,[1] Spence was the most cited Died January 12, 1967 (aged 59)
psychologist in the 14 most influential psychology
journals in the last six years of his life (1962 – 1967).[2] A Nationality American
Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, Alma mater McGill University
ranked Spence as the 62nd most cited psychologist of the Yale University
20th century.[3]
Known for Contiuous Account of
Discrimination Learning
Hull-Spence Learning Theory
Contents Spouse(s) Janet Taylor Spence (m. 1960)
Personal history Children Bill
Professional contributions Awards 1929 Prince of Wales Gold
Discrimination learning Medal in Mental Sciences,
Motivation McGill University
Teaching
1930 Governor General's
Influential publications Medal for Research, McGill
Discrimination learning University
Theoretical 1953 Howard Crosby
Eyelid conditioning Warren Medal, Society of
Experimental Psychology
References
1955 Yale University
External links Silliman Lectures

1956 First Distinguished

Personal history Scientific Contribution Award,
American Psychological
Spence was born in Chicago on May 6, 1907.[1] In 1911, Association
Spence's father, an electrical engineer, moved the family Scientific career
to Montreal, Quebec, Canada when transferred by his
Fields Psychology
employer, Western Electric.[4] Spence spent his youth and
adolescence there, attending West Hill High School in Institutions University of Virginia
Notre Dame de Grace.[1][4] While in high school, Spence University of Iowa
was involved in basketball, tennis and track.[1] University of Texas

Spence sustained a back injury during a track competition Doctoral

Robert M. Yerkes
while attending McGill University.[1] As part of his advisor
physical therapy, Spence moved to live with his Influenced Clark L. Hull
grandmother in LaCrosse, Wisconsin.[1] There, Spence
attended LaCrosse Teacher's College and majored in Physical Education, and met his future wife Isabel
Temte.[1] He and Isabel had two children, Shirley Ann Spence Pumroy and William James Spence.[1]
Spence and Isabel later divorced, and Spence was remarried to Janet A. Taylor, his graduate student, in
1960.[5]

Spence eventually returned to McGill University and changed his major to psychology.[1] He received his
B.A. in 1929, and M.A. in 1930.[1][4] After McGill, Spence attended Yale University as a research assistant
to Robert M. Yerkes.[1] Yerkes sponsored his dissertation, a study on the visual acuity of chimpanzees.[1]
Spence received his PhD from Yale in 1933.[1][4]

While at Yale, Spence collaborated with Walter Shipley to test Clark L. Hull's blind alley maze learning in
rats, a contribution which led to further publications while pursuing his PhD.[1] Spence applied to a
postdoctoral fellowship to study mathematics after the completion of his graduate training, but his
application was rejected by a biologist on the grounds that psychology would never reach a level of
precision to require sophisticated mathematical knowledge.[4]

Professional contributions

Discrimination learning

After his PhD, Spence accepted a position as National Research Council at Yale Laboratories of Primate
Biology[1][4] in Orange Park, Florida from 1933 to 1937.[4] There, Spence examined discrimination
learning in chimpanzees.[4] From this and further research, Spence developed the continuous learning
account of two-choice discrimination learning in rats.[4] As reported by Lashley (1929), rats in a two-
choice discrimination task demonstrated an extended period of chance performance, followed by a sudden
leap to a high percentage of accurate responding.[2] Lashley explained this phenomenon by suggesting that
the rat's essential learning emerged from testing and confirming the correct hypothesis "during the rapidly
changing portion of the function, with the practice preceding and the errors following being irrelevant to the
final solution."[2] In contrast, Spence proposed that essential learning was produced through increases in
the excitatory tendencies of task-relevant characteristics of the display, and decreases in inhibitory
tendencies of the non-relevant characteristics of the display – a continuous learning account not directly
detected by the choice measure.[2]

Motivation

Spence moved to the University of Iowa in 1938, and was appointed to the head of the psychology
department in 1942.[4] There, Spence established an eyelid-conditioning lab to study the influence of
motivation on classical conditioning, and contributed to Clark Hull's seminal Principles of Behavior
book.[4] Like Hull, Spence believed learning was the result of the interaction between drive and incentive
motivation. Unlike Hull, Spence's formulation summed drive (D) and incentive motivation (K) instead of
multiplying them.[5] This allowed Spence "to show that increasing motivational level will facilitate
performance on tasks in which the correct, to-be-learned response is stronger than those of other response-
tendencies elicited by a stimulus, but will deter performance on tasks in which the habit-strength of the
correct response is initially weaker than those of competing response-tendencies. He showed also that the
mathematical form of the curves obtained when probability of the conditioned response is plotted against
successive presentations of the paired stimulus changes systematically with motivational level."[5] Spence
believed that differences in motivation were attributable to internal emotional responses created by an
intraorganic brain mechanism.[4]
Spence's contributions to Hull's Principles of Behavior are commemorated in the book's foreword, where
Hull stated: "To Kenneth L. Spence I owe a debt of gratitude which cannot adequately be indicated in this
place; from the time when the ideas here put forward were in the process of incubation in my graduate
seminar and later when the present work was being planned, on through its many revisions, Dr. Spence has
contributed generously and effectively with suggestions and criticisms, large numbers of which have been
utilized without indication of their origin." The variable for incentive motivation (K) was said to have been
chosen in honor of Kenneth Spence.[5]

Teaching

Spence directed a total of 75 PhD theses,[2] producing faculty members in every major psychology
department in the United States.[2] Students of Spence at Iowa referred to their degrees as PhDs in
"theoretical-experimental psychology"[1] due to Spence's emphasis on methodological rigor.

Influential publications

Discrimination learning
The Nature of Discrimination Learning in Animals, 1936.[6]
The Differential Response in Animals to Stimuli Varying Within a Single Dimension, 1937.[7]
Continuous Versus Non-continuous Interpretations of Discrimination Learning, 1940.[8]

Theoretical
The Nature of Theory Construction in Contemporary Psychology, 1944.[9]
The Postulates and Methods of Behaviorism, 1948.[10]
Theoretical Interpretations of Learning, 1951.[11]
Mathematical Formulations of Learning Phenomena, 1952.[12]
Behavior Theory and Conditioning, 1956.[13]

Eyelid conditioning
Anxiety and Strength of the UCS as Determiners of the Amount of Eyelid Conditioning,
1951.[14]
Cognitive and Drive Factors in the Extinction of the Conditioned Eyeblink in Human
Subjects, 1966.[15]

References
1. Amsel, Abram (1995). "Kenneth Wartinbee Spence". Biographical Memoirs. 66: 335–351.
2. Wagner, Allan (2008). "Some observations and remembrances of Kenneth W. Spence" (http
s://doi.org/10.3758%2FLB.36.3.169). Learning & Behavior. 36 (3): 169–173.
doi:10.3758/LB.36.3.169 (https://doi.org/10.3758%2FLB.36.3.169).
 3. Haggbloom, Steven J.; Warnick, Renee; Warnick, Jason E.; Jones, Vinessa K.; Yarbrough,
Gary L.; Russell, Tenea M.; Borecky, Chris M.; McGahhey, Reagan; Powell, John L., III;
Beavers, Jamie; Monte, Emmanuelle (2002). "The 100 most eminent psychologists of the
20th century" (http://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug02/eminent.aspx). Review of General
Psychology. 6 (2): 139–52. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.586.1913 (https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdo
c/summary?doi=10.1.1.586.1913). doi:10.1037/1089-2680.6.2.139 (https://doi.org/10.1037%
2F1089-2680.6.2.139). S2CID 145668721 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:14566
8721).
4. Kendler, Howard (1967). "Kenneth W. Spence (1907-1967): Obituary". Psychological
Review. 74 (5): 335–341. doi:10.1037/h0024873 (https://doi.org/10.1037%2Fh0024873).
PMID 4864832 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4864832).
5. Hilgard, Ernest (1967). "Kenneth Wartinbee Spence: 1907-1967". The American Journal of
Psychology (2): 314. PMID 4861576 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4861576).
6. Spence, Kenneth (1936). "The Nature of Discrimination Learning in Animals". Psychological
Review. 43 (5): 427–449. doi:10.1037/h0056975 (https://doi.org/10.1037%2Fh0056975).
7. Spence, Kenneth (1937). "The differential response in animals to stimuli varying within a
single dimension". Psychological Review. 44 (5): 430–444. doi:10.1037/h0062885 (https://d
oi.org/10.1037%2Fh0062885).
8. Spence, Kenneth (1940). "Continuous versus non-continuous interpretations of
discrimination learning". Psychological Review. 47 (4): 271–288. doi:10.1037/h0054336 (htt
ps://doi.org/10.1037%2Fh0054336).
9. Spence, Kenneth (1944). "The nature of theory construction in contemporary psychology".
Psychological Review. 51: 47–68. doi:10.1037/h0060940 (https://doi.org/10.1037%2Fh0060
940).
10. Spence, Kenneth (1948). "The postulates and methods of behaviorism". Psychological
Review. 55 (2): 67–69. doi:10.1037/h0063589 (https://doi.org/10.1037%2Fh0063589).
PMID 18910282 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18910282).
11. Spence, Kenneth (1951). "Theoretical interpretations of learning". Handbook of
Experimental Psychology: 690–729.
12. Spence, Kenneth (1952). "Mathematical formulations of learning phenomena".
Psychological Review. 59 (2): 152–160. doi:10.1037/h0058010 (https://doi.org/10.1037%2F
h0058010). PMID 14920650 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14920650).
13. Spence, Kenneth (1956). Behavior Theory and Conditioning (https://archive.org/details/beha
viortheoryco00spen). New Haven: Yale University Press.
14. Taylor, Janet; Spence, Kenneth (1951). "Anxiety and strength of the UCS as determiners of
the amount of eyelid conditioning". Journal of Experimental Psychology. 42 (3): 183–188.
doi:10.1037/h0061580 (https://doi.org/10.1037%2Fh0061580). PMID 14880670 (https://pub
med.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14880670).
15. Spence, Kenneth (1966). "Cognitive and drive factors in the extinction of the conditioned
eyeblink in human subjects". Psychological Review. 73 (5): 445–449.
doi:10.1037/h0023638 (https://doi.org/10.1037%2Fh0023638). PMID 5976738 (https://pubm
ed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/5976738).

External links
Kenneth Spence (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/107774082) at Find a Grave

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