Curio Cabinet

Behavioral psychology is for the birds.

Having a "bird-brain" wasn't such a bad thing in the mind of psychologist B. F. Skinner. A pioneer in behaviorism—the study of human and animal behaviors established by patterned conditioning—Skinner was one of the 20th century's most brilliant minds in psychology. Details of his training experiments with pigeons also prove he had one of science's most quirky minds.
 

Burrhus Frederick Skinner can thank a failed literary career for his legacy. After graduating from Harvard in 1926 and concluding he lacked the life skills necessary to become a great writer, Skinner discovered the works of John B. Watson, the editor of the Psychological Review and founder of the psychological school of behaviorism. Skinner felt like a social outsider for his atheist beliefs at the time, but found solace in Watson's idea that a person's actions had no internal cognitive or moral foundation—that all choices could be explained through external stimuli.
 

Skinner was on to something, and as a graduate student at Harvard, he developed the Skinner Box: a chamber used to conduct behavioral experiments on animals using operant conditioning, or learning through rewards and punishment. In one instance, Skinner tested a schedule of reinforcement, where pigeons were taught to peck at a red disc on the wall to cause a box beneath to dispense food. Not every peck would earn a reward (called "reinforcement" in behaviorism terms), but enough came at random that the pigeons perpetually engaged in the task. Skinner remarked that these schedules of reinforcement showed how people could become pathologically addicted to gambling and, he conjectured, how the concept of free will did not apply to such situations.
 

Skinner also taught his pigeons other tasks through painstaking reinforcement systems; eventually, they could determine the difference between a sign that said "turn" and one that said "peck," applying the correct movements for food rewards. In another instance, Skinner taught two pigeons to play ping-pong, where hitting the ball until the other pigeon lost triggered a food reward to drop in a box beneath the table. Word of his experiments got around to the U.S. military, and in 1943, Skinner proposed "Project Pigeon" to the National Research Defense Committee. Improved missile guidance was a high priority during World War II, and Skinner believed birds could address the issue as "'devices' with excellent vision and extraordinary maneuverability." The committee was skeptical of Skinner's success but granted him $25,000 in funding to begin the project.
 

What followed sounds like the plot of an anthropomorphic Pixar film: Skinner built a nose cone fitted with three pigeon cockpits and three electronic screens. Projections were fed through the screens with Skinner rewarding the pigeons when they pecked at the target. He believed he could train all three Project Pigeon pilots to peck at the same time, causing cable harnesses attached to their heads to mechanically guide the missile to its final mark. In spite of a successful demonstration, the military shelved Skinner's project. Which is just as well, seeing as how Skinner's rocket was designed to detonate with the birds in tow.
 

After the war, Skinner spent less time with his pigeons and more time applying his schedules of reinforcement to machines, providing some of the basis for contemporary machine learning. As for his pigeon-guided missile head, it ended up at the Smithsonian: as Skinner completed his own autobiography, he often donated his devices to the national museum foreseeing their importance as historical artifacts before his death on August 18, 1990. Even if his personal philosophy was dismissive of consciousness and the subconscious in influencing behaviors, his work in advancing behavioral psychology was unparalleled. And at least he didn't have to go out of this world guiding the head of a missile!
 

Below: a video of Skinner's pigeons playing ping-pong, and two views of B. F. Skinner's nose cone for the pigeon-guided missile.
 

Image credit & copyright: National Museum of American History
 

Happy National Middle Children's Day! To celebrate all the supposedly overlooked middle siblings around the world, we're tackling a long-standing myth—that birth order affects how kids turn out. We've all seen childhood displays of behavior blamed on the sequence of birth: the oldest is intelligent and bossy, the middle is shy, and the youngest is always the extroverted rebel. But according to abundant scientific data, these tropes have little bearing on the real world. In 1960, a team of researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign began a longitudinal study of 377,000 high school students. They collected data through IQ tests, self-reported personality tests, and other means. After several decades, they finally published their findings in the Journal of Research in Personality in 2015. It turns out that firstborns do benefit from a one-IQ-point leg up over their younger siblings, on average. They also tend to be slightly more conscientious. But according to the study's co-leader, professor Brent Roberts, this difference is statistically insignificant. "You're not going to be able to sit two people down next to each other and see the differences between them. It's not noticeable by anybody," he said, adding that factors like income and trauma are far more influential in how a child turns out. Personally, I've never understood what all the fuss about birth order is about, but then again my big brother is only eight minutes older than I am.
 

Image credit & copyright: Positive Parenting Solutions