Grice on the Yerkes-Dodson Law: From the Banal to the Bizarre

---- By J. L. Speranza


--- IN "METHOD IN PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY", which Grice delivered as President of the American Philosophical Association (Pacific Branch -- it's a three-head monarchy, Prof. Grice -- he had just been appointed _full_ at Berkeley refers to the Yerkes Dodson Law. What fascinated Grice about Yerkes/Dodson protocol was the _goal_. Grice was supposed to be delivering the Grand Truth, and instead he refers to this law ("there is, or _was_ this law") of "empirical pscychology", "based on experiments," Grice continues,

"designed to test degrees of learning compentence
in rats set to run mazes under water, after varying
periods of initial constraints; it states (in effect)"

--- This was the 'in-effect' Grice phase. Every other word he uttered was to the effect that something was 'in effect' -- the implicature being that the audiences were growing more and more sceptical

"that, with other factors constant, degrees of
learning competence are correlated with
degrees of emotional stress"

---- it's under water,Jesus Grice Almighty!

"by a function whose values form
a bell curve." He adds,

"Interesting, no?"

A member of the audience said, "No."

What Grice is considering is the 'form' of an empirical psychological 'law' (so-called). He has posited a problem for empirical psychology that he does not necessarily see in his preferred branch of his science, 'rational psychology'. A member of the audience screamed:

---- 'THAT'S NO SCIENCE!'

Grice mpf-ed and took a sip of water. "The problem with rational psychology is that you need to be rational to engage in it. The good thing is that we cannot medicate."

"But what do the swimming rats have to do with this?"

"Well, if a swimming rat can swim, he'll overlearn."

"Over-learn what?"

"The bell-curve: some will die, as they drown, and some may not even want to play, but those who don't die, etc, should be subjected to enhance interrogation."

"Waterboard?"

"No. We'll discuss Wittgenstein's _Philosophical Investigations_. There are a few points there that should interest rats."

"A rat would not TOUCH a philosophy book."

"Oh yes, he will; yes, he will." [INTERLUDE For R. B. Jones: there is an online site for the 56 boxes of stuff that Carnap left for UCLA. A research grant was established for a young graduate to catalogue it all. It's all online: One report goes, "Box 45, second folder contains books eaten by rats" -- we suppose, too "that the order of the papers was not the one Carnap intended", why, the books were deposited in UCLA 5 years after the man died, while they were moving the thing from one place to the other. Grice only has 14 boxes at UC/Berkeley].

"But a rat can _refute_ the law?"

"Yes, and a man, too. Caffeine for example."

"What about it?"

"Despite what your teachers will tell you: a good dose of caffeine before an exam on implicature may help you."

"Help me what?"

"Not to fall asleep".

"Are you grading".

"S'ppose so" [Chapman says that the Dept. of Philo would often have to remind and remind and remind and remind and remind Prof Grice to upload the grades, and in Oxfod he was known as "Godot" as piles of students gathered in the stairs leading to his small studio -- obit. Richardson, THIS FORUM].

-------

So, Grice is proposing a theory, call it Th.

From this we derive 'laws'.

The laws are formulated in psychological terms already which are thus 'theoretical terms', NOT observational (cfr. Freud).

For each theoretical term, a correspondence "rule" is found:

"How do you know the student is learning?"

"Well, he is not playing football, he is not having sex, he has his eyes focused on an open book, he has turned off the television, he is sweating, and his text is tomorrow morning. What more behavioural evidence do you want?"

"Will his sweat help?"

"Yes, but I'd still suggest he takes a good bath before taking the exam."

"It's a machine thing -- surely the computer wouldn't mind."

"She would not, but his fingers can get sticky and press the wrong keys".

----

"Will he need to perform the test _under water_?"

"You tire me with your questions."

----------------

---- THIS LEAFLET HE FOUND OUT later on and she gave it to me.

"The Yerkes-Dodson law is an
empirical relationship between
arousal and performance,
originally developed by psychologists,

Robert M. Yerkes

&

John Dillingham Dodson

in 1908. The law dictates that
performance increases with
physiological or mental arousal,
but only up to a point."

"When levels of arousal become too high, performance decreases. The process is often illustrated graphically as a curvilinear, inverted U-shaped curve which increases and then decreases with higher levels of arousal. Research has found that different tasks require different levels of arousal for optimal performance. E.g. difficult or intellectually demanding tasks may require a lower level of arousal (to facilitate concentration), whereas tasks demanding stamina or persistence may be performed better with higher levels of arousal (to increase motivation). Because of task differences, the shape of the curve can be highly variable. For simple or well learned tasks, the relationship can be considered linear with improvements in performance as arousal increases. For complex, unfamiliar, or difficult tasks, the relationship between arousal and performance becomes inverse, with declines in performance as arousal increases. The effect of task difficulty led to the hypothesis that the Yerkes-Dodson Law can be decomposed into two distinct factors – compare bathtub curve. The upward part of the inverted U can be thought of as the energizing effect of arousal. The downward part is caused by negative effects of arousal (or stress) on cognitive processes like attention (e.g. "tunnel vision"), memory, and problem-solving. There has been research indicating that the correlation suggested by Yerkes & Dodson exists (such as that of Broadhurst 1959, Duffy 1962, Anderson, 1988), but a cause of the correlation has not yet successfully been established (Anderson-Revelle-Lynch 1989). A 2007 review of the effects of stress glucocorticoids and human cognition revealed that memory performance vs. circulating levels of glucocorticoids does manifest an upside down U shaped curve. The authors noted the resemblance to the Yerkes-Dodson curve. E.g. long-term potentiation (the process of forming long term memories) is optimal when glucocorticoid levels are mildly elevated whereas significant decreases of LTP are observed after adrenalectomy (low GC state) or after exogenous glucocorticoid administration (high GC state). It was also revealed that "in order for a situation to induce a stress response it has to be interpreted as novel and/or unpredictable, and/or the individual must have the feeling that they do not have control over the situation. Presence of a social evaluative threat constitutes the fourth." It has also been shown that elevated levels of glucocorticoids enhanced memory for emotionally arousing events but lead more often than not to poor memory for material unrelated to the source of stress/emotional arousal. If only a few points are presented then the theory can account for most results, however, both performance and arousal are presented by single terms but they are multidimensional. Also, the theory is descriptive and not an explanatory one. The Yerkes-Dodson law predicts that over-learning can improve performance in states of high arousal.

REFS.

Yerkes/Dodson 1908. 'The relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit-formation.
Journal of Comparative Neurology & Psychology 18:459-482.
Anderson, K. Impulsivity, and memory scanning: an explanation for the Yerkes-Dodson effect. Motivation & Emotion, 13.

The important things to consider are various:

-- the form of psychological law will be caeteris-paribus in form: If A --caeteris paribus--> B

-- the triviality of the law needs to be challenged while not yet turning the thing into a 'necessary' truth.

Etc.