Prof. James V. McConnell of the University’s psychology department internationally known researcher on learning, will be the speaker at this year’s Southeastern Michigan Science Fair Awards Luncheon.
In announcing the speaker, Gordon J. LeBrasse, Federal Mogul Research
Federal-Mogul Corporation is an American developer, manufacturer, and supplier of products for automotive, commercial, aerospace, marine, rail, and off-road vehicles; as well as industrial, agricultural, and power-generation applications.
director and director of the fire, said the luncheon will be held at 1 p.m. Saturday, April 11, in the Michigan League Ballroom.
More then 200 entry card have been received from junior and senior high school students from five area counties who plan to exibit science projects at the sixth annual event next Friday through Sunday, April 12, at the U-M Sports Building.
Late entries for the fair are expected up until Monday morning, although the deadline for nailing entry cards Wednesday of this week. A record total of 258 entries was received for last year’s fair.
The fair is sponsored annually by the Ann Arbor Exchange Club, the U-M and the News. It is open to students from junior and senior high schools in Washtenaw,
Washtenaw County is a county located in the U.S. state of Michigan.
Monroe,
Monroe County is a county in the U.S. state of Michigan.
Lenawee,
Lenawee County is a county located in the U.S. state of Michigan.
Jackson,
Jackson County is a county located in the U.S. state of Michigan.
Hillsdale
Hillsdale County is a county located in the U.S. state of Michigan.
and Livingston
Livingston County is a county located in the U.S. state of Michigan.
County.
In the United States, a county or county equivalent is an administrative or political subdivision of a state that consists of a geographic region with specific boundaries and usually some level of governmental authority.
Prizes paid for with funds donated by area industrial and business firms will include expense-paid trips to the National Science Fair-International.
National Science and Engineering Fair is an annual science fair in the United States.
May 6-9 in Baltimore, Md.
Baltimore is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland.
various cash awards, scholarships, medals, ribbons, books, cameras, a U.S. Navy
The United States Navy is the maritime service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the eight uniformed services of the United States.
science cruise and others.
McConnell, who will address the fair entrants, achieved fame with his studies of learning in flatworms that are being conducted at the U-M Mental Health Research Institute Building.
A major article on his work appeared in last week’s Saturday Evening Post. Similar articles have appeared in newspapers and other publications throughout the country.
He edits and publishes the Worm Runner’s Digest an informal journal of comparative psychology that has an international circulation of more than 2,000 copies.
McConnell has served as consultant to the
U.S. Department of Defense in problems of persuasion and motivation. He also has served as consultant to the Smithsonian Institution, and in 1961 was consuitant to the United States Department of Commerce. During that time he played a major role in planning the behavioral exhibits for the Seattle
Seattle is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States.
World’s Fair.
A world’s fair, also known as a universal exhibition or an expo, is a large international exhibition designed to showcase the achievements of nations.
Last year he was granted the Research Career Development Award of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, National Institutes of Health. He has been awarded a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto, Calif.
Palo Alto is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California,
A former announcer, production supervisor and program director for various radio stations in the South, McConnell left the radio filed in 1951 and enrolled at the University of Texas where he received a master’s degree in psychology. He was graduatedfrom Louisiana State University in 1947.
After receiving his master’s degree, McConnell became a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Oslo, Norway.
The University of Oslo is a public research university located in Oslo, Norway.
He also lectured at the universities of Nijemegen
Nijmegen is the largest city in the Dutch province of Gelderland and the tenth largest of the Netherlands as a whole.
and Utrecht
Utrecht is the fourth-largest city and a municipality of the Netherlands, capital and most populous city of the province of Utrecht.
in The Netherlands,
Tübingen is a traditional university city in central Baden-Württemberg, Germany.
and at Tübingen
The Netherlands, informally Holland, is a country located in northwestern Europe with overseas territories in the Caribbean.
in Germany.
Germany,[e] officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe.
He received his doctorate from the University of Texas in 1956.
He then came to the U-M as
Larry Stern. Psychological Hijinks
Comedians and cartoonists have been poking fun at science — and especially at psychologists — for decades. But one need not look outside the halls of academia to find such humor. Indeed, for my money, nothing beats the humor contained in the Worm Runner’s Digest, published between 1959 and 1979. If your library subscribed, you might find it and its twin, the Journal of Biological Psychology, nestled between the serious Journal of Applied Psychology and Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology.
The brainchild of James V. McConnell, then an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, the Worm Runner’s Digest burst on the scene as a new 1960s counterculture was beginning to take form. Devoted in part to puncturing the pretentiousness and pomposity of that sacred cow known as science, it was, as McConnell noted, one of the first scientific journals that knowingly published satire.
What, then, prompted the creation of this peculiar journal?
It began with a paper McConnell presented on the morning of Sept. 8, 1959, at APA’s 67th Annual Convention. In this paper, Apparent Retention of a Conditioned Response Following Total Regeneration in the Planarian, McConnell reported data collected by one of his honors students, Reeva Jacobson, which indicated that separate pieces of trained worms, after being allowed to regenerate their missing parts, retained the initial training of the original uncut worm. Moreover, after several regenerations, worms that contained none of the structure of the originally trained animal also retained some memory of the initial conditioning.
On Sept. 21, Newsweek published a summary of this work, triggering a series of events that no one — certainly not McConnell — ever expected.
Two years earlier, the Soviet Union’s successful launch of Sputnik sparked fears that the United States lagged behind the Soviets in science and technology. One result, designed to ignite the youth of America’s interest in science, was a renewed emphasis on local science fairs.
Shortly after the Newsweek coverage, McConnell was inundated with letters from high school students from around the country asking where they could obtain worms for their projects and how they should go about caring for and training them. Some students, according to McConnell, demanded that he send a few hundred trained worms at once since their projects were due within days.
After answering the first few letters McConnell realized that something more efficient was needed. So he and his students wrote what amounted to a training manual describing their work and how to repeat their experiments.
McConnell firmly believed that
To McConnell’s astonishment, word of this new journal got out and he started receiving submissions. So he decided to pep things up a bit by scattering poems, jokes, satires, cartoons, spoofs and short stories more or less randomly among the more serious articles.
McConnell wrote some of these spoofs himself, including one on learning theory that should be mandatory reading. In it, a psychology professor is walking in the woods thinking about how to teach his intro students the finer points of learning theory when he suddenly finds himself in a giant Skinner box on an alien spaceship, complete with a nipple on the wall that delivers a slightly cool and somewhat sweetish flow of liquidand, later, a lever that when pulled delivers protein balls of food. The experiments the subject endures are classic, and if the denouement does not bring a smile, well, perhaps you are in a perilous state of mental health.
Dozens of reputable psychologists contributed humor to the digest as well. Harry Harlow had two pieces: Fundamental Principles for Preparing Psychology Journal Articles and a poem, Yearning and Learning, a somewhat bawdy look at how monkeys learn to copulate.
B.F. Skinner contributed two parodies of behaviorism: A Christmas Caramel, or A Plum from the Hasty Pudding, in which he plays the role of Professor Skinnybox, and On the Relation Between Mathematical and Statistical Competence and Significant Scientific Productivity, which he published under the pseudonym of F. Galton Pennywhistle.
Spoofs of Freudian theory also appeared. Some Comments on an Addition to the Theory of Psychosexual Development by Sigmund Fraud introduced the nasal stage, occurring between the anal and phallic stages, in which the libido is localized primarily in the mucous linings of the nose. Though the consequences of poor nasal training might not be as drastic as those accompanying poor toilet training, two pathlogies might ensue: feelings of superiority that lead you to turn your nose up at others, and/or being a busybody and constantly sticking your nose in others’ business.
Other notable contributions that graced the Digest’s pages include faux reports on The Effects of Physical Torture on the Learning and Retention of Nonsense Syllables, The Gesundheits Test and Operant Conditioning in the Domestic Darning Needle.
