The following year he worked as a research assistant to Lashley and as a teaching assistant in introductory psychology for Edwin G. In 1936, he received his PhD from Harvard. That is, he raised rats in the dark and some in the light and compared their brains. At Harvard, he did his thesis research on the effects of early visual deprivation upon size and brightness perception in a rat. Hebb, along with two other students, followed Lashley to Harvard University in September 1935. His thesis was titled "The problem of spatial orientation and place learning". In July 1934, Hebb was accepted to study under Karl Lashley at the University of Chicago. Babkin, however, convinced Hebb to study instead with Karl Lashley at the University of Chicago. He decided to leave Montreal and wrote to Robert Yerkes at Yale, where he was offered a position to study for a PhD. In his words, it was "defeated by the rigidity of the curriculum in Quebec's protestant schools." The focus of study at McGill was more in the direction of education and intelligence, and Hebb was now more interested in physiological psychology and was critical of the methodology of the experiments there. His work at the Montreal school was going badly. His wife had died, following a car accident, on his twenty-ninth birthday (July 22, 1933). īy the beginning of 1934, Hebb's life was in a slump. Hebb's master's thesis, entitled Conditioned and Unconditioned Reflexes and Inhibition, tried to show that skeletal reflexes were due to cellular learning. He completed his master's degree in psychology at McGill in 1932 under the direction of the eminent psychologist Boris Babkin. He took a more innovative approach to education-for example, assigning more interesting schoolwork and sending anyone misbehaving outside (making schoolwork a privilege). He worked with two colleagues from the university, Kellogg and Clarke, to improve the situation. But, at the same time, he was appointed headmaster of Verdun High School in the suburbs of Montreal. In 1928, he became a graduate student at McGill University. Later, he worked on a farm in Alberta and then traveled around, working as a laborer in Quebec. Afterward, he became a teacher, teaching at his old school in Chester. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1925. Those in 9th and 10th grades were permitted to advance despite their failure but there was no 12th grade in Chester.) He entered Dalhousie University aiming to become a novelist. (Many or most of the single class of grade 9, 10 and 11 students at the Chester school failed the provincial examinations. He performed so well in elementary school that he was promoted to the 7th grade at 10 years of age but, as a result of failing and then repeating the 11th grade in Chester, he graduated from the 12th grade at 16 years of age from Halifax County Academy. Donald's mother was heavily influenced by the ideas of Maria Montessori, and she home-schooled him until the age of 8. Hebb's parents were both medical doctors. Clara (Olding) Hebb, and lived there until the age of 16, when his parents moved to Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. His views on learning described behavior and thought in terms of brain function, explaining cognitive processes in terms of connections between neuron assemblies.ĭonald Hebb was born in Chester, Nova Scotia, the oldest of four children of Arthur M. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Hebb as the 19th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. He has been described as the father of neuropsychology and neural networks. He is best known for his theory of Hebbian learning, which he introduced in his classic 1949 work The Organization of Behavior. Donald Olding Hebb FRS (J– August 20, 1985) was a Canadian psychologist who was influential in the area of neuropsychology, where he sought to understand how the function of neurons contributed to psychological processes such as learning.
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