Pioneering Studies of Spatial Behavior in Animals: Ivane Beritashvili and Edward Tolman

Abstract

 Ivane S. Beritashvili’s doctrine of image-driven behavior was established in the late 1920s and finally extended in his books in English (1965; 1971). It bears a strong resemblance to the concepts of purposive behavior and “cognitive maps” developed in parallel by Edward C. Tolman (1932; 1948) and significantly anticipated respective modern concepts. John O’Keefe and his disciples May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser received the Nobel Prize in 2014 for their discoveries of cells that constitute a navigation system in the brain. The latter fact brings us to the pioneers of the study of the spatial orientation of animals that figuratively speaking, provided the giant’s shoulders on which O’Keefe and the Mosers stood to receive their award. Beritashvili and Tolman upheld the holistic and goal-directed nature of spatial behavior. A major contribution of Beritashvili to the science of animal behavior was the demonstration of the universality of learning following a single presentation of an object vitally important to the animal: either a food object or a noxious signal. Beritashvili showed that such “image-driven” behavior has a strong spatial component, i.e., the image is projected into a definite point in space. Thus, he came to maintain that there is a class of behavior that is image-driven that does not require a repetition of associations. Tolman made several significant contributions to the field of experimental psychology. He thought of learning as developing from bits of knowledge and cognitions about the environment and how the organism relates to it. He examined the role that reinforcement plays in the way that rats learn their way through complex mazes. These experiments eventually led to the theory of latent learning which describes learning that occurs in the absence of an obvious reward. Tolman also strongly advocated the theory that rats learn the place where they have been rewarded rather than the particular movements required to get there. To a great extent, Tolman’s work determined the direction of American psychology in the 1930s-1950s. The contribution of Beritashvili and Tolman, thus, is the groundwork of modern studies of spatial cognitive processes in human and nonhuman animals.