Edward chace Tolman (1886–1959) was born in new ton, Massachusetts. he received his bachelor’s degree from MiT, and his doctorate in psychology from harvard in 1915. Tolman spent almost his entire...

Edward chace Tolman (1886–1959) was born in new ton, Massachusetts. he received his bachelor’s degree from MiT, and his doctorate in psychology from harvard in 1915. Tolman spent almost his entire career at the university of california at Berkeley. while he considered himself a behaviourist, and his own research was done almost entirely with rats, Tolman’s work bears little resemblance to the radical behaviourists, such as watson and Skinner. a contemporary of watson, he rejected the emphasis on reflexes and trial and error learning which were central to watson’s views. instead, he developed a concept of ‘purposive behaviourism’, which emphasized the distinction between learning and performance (as seen in latent learning), and viewed learning in terms of the formation of ‘hypotheses’ and ‘cognitive maps’. Both by showing the weaknesses of radical behaviourism, and by proposing concepts which acknowledged the existence of mediational processes, Tolman helped lay the foundations for the cognitive approach. he was 73 when he died – just a few years before the blossoming of the cognitive approach in the 1960s.