Plans and the Structure of Behavior

By George Armitage Miller, Eugene Galanter, Karl H. Pribram

Book Overview

2013 Reprint of 1960 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. By 1960, psychology had come to be dominated by behaviorism and learning theory, which emphasized the observable stimulus and response components of human and animal behavior while ignoring the cognitive processes that mediate the relationship between the stimulus and response. The cognitive phenomena occurring within the "black box" between stimulus and response were of little interest to behaviorists, as their mathematical models worked without them. In 1960, the book "Plans and the Structure of Behavior," authored by George A. Miller, Eugene Galanter, and Karl H. Pribram, was published. In this volume, Miller and his colleagues sought to unify the behaviorists' learning theory with a cognitive model of learned behavior. Whereas the behaviorists suggested that a simple reflex arc underlies the acquisition of the stimulus-response relationship, Miller and his colleagues proposed that "some mediating organization of experience is necessary" somewhere between the stimulus and response, in effect a cognitive process which must include monitoring devices that control the acquisition of the stimulus-response relationship. They named this fundamental unit of behavior the T.O.T.E. for "Test - Operate - Test - Exit".

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1614275203
• ISBN13: 9781614275206
• Release Date: November 2013
• Publisher: Martino Fine Books
• Length: 238 Pages
• Weight: 1.04 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A building stone for Cognitive Science and for NLP

As you will be able to read in the new Foreword by Donald Broadbent of the University of Oxford, this book has had a major impact on psychology and helped achieve the switch to cognitive psychology. This book triggered much of the research that lead to Ulric Neisser's book "Cognitive Psychology". The five stars I gave are related to the importance of this book - when reading this book in 2001, without taking this background into account, I would still rate it 4 stars.This book argues that our behavior is guided by our plans. People move from sub-goal to sub-goal until their purposes are achieved. A basic concept to explain that is the feedback loop which comes from engineering and is know as the TOTE model inside the NLP community. When NLPers try to model a person's strategy (e.g. for taking a decision), they are in fact looking for the basic building blocks of the TOTE. This books contains a chapter on "Plans for Speaking", showing the link between Miller and Chomsky, another father of modern cogintive science (and NLP).Of course, if you just want to grasp the basic concept, there is no need to read this book given that many books that are linked to practical applications of cogitive science (such as NLP) will include the model. For instance, the first part of the third chapter of my book "7 Steps on Emotional Intelligence" is built around on the TOTE model.I consider this book a "must" for any scolar of cognitive science in general and of NLP in particular that wants some background on their domain.Patrick E.C. Merlevede, MSc -- co-author of "7 Steps to Emotional Intelligence"