The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology

By J. Dewey. 2011

1,029 citations recorded by the source corpus.

That the greater demand for a unifying principle and controlling working hypothesis in psychology should come at just the time when all generalizations and classifications are most questioned and questionable is natural enough. It is the very cumulation of discrete facts creating the demand for unification that also breaks down previous lines of classification. The material is too great in mass and too varied in style to fit into existing pigeonholes , and the cabinets of science break of their own dead weight. The idea of the reflex arc has upon the whole come nearer to meeting this demand for a general working hypothesis than any other single concept. It being admitted that the sensori-motor apparatus represents both the unit of nerve structure and the type of nerve function, the image of this relationship passed over into psychology, and became an organizing principle to hold together the multiplicity of fact. In criticising this conception it is not intended to make a plea for the principles of explanation and classification which the reflex arc idea has replaced; but, on the contrary, to urge that they are not sufficiently displaced, and that in the idea of the sensori-motor circuit, conceptions of the nature of sensation and of action derived from the nominally displaced psychology are still in control. The older dualism between sensation and idea is repeated in the current dualism of peripheral and central structures and functions; the older dualism of body and soul finds a distinct

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Social Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Ecological cognition: expert decision-making behaviour in sport (2017, background): “…more subsystems engaged in the emergence of behaviours than simply the CNS. Evidence for this view is abundant in the literature, traced back to Dewey (1896) (but see recent reviews of empirical evidence from Reed, 1982, 1996; Richardson, Shockley, Fajen, Riley, & Turvey, 2008; Seifert, Komar,…”
Situation Awareness (2015, background): “Unfortunately, Endsley (2015) fails to acknowledge the important distinction that other cognitive engineers have made between task analysis and work analysis (Naikar, 2013; Vicente, 1999).”
Enactive Metaphors: Learning Through Full-Body Engagement (2015, background): “It could have easily drawn on the work of John Dewey and other pragmatists. Indeed, long before Varela et al. (1991), Dewey (1896) clearly characterized what has become known as enactivism.”
Embodiment in Mathematics Teaching and Learning: Evidence From Learners' and Teachers' Gestures (2012, background): “This claim is based on the assumption that there are bidirectional, reciprocal relations between perception and action (eg, Dewey, 1896 ; Gibson, 1979 ).”
Language, gesture, action! A test of the Gesture as Simulated Action framework (2010, background): “Indeed, a long tradition in cognitive psychology views perception and action as linked in a cycle of coordination (Dewey, 1896; Gibson, 1979; Sperry, 1952).”
Learning, Theories of Learning, and Units of Analysis in Research (2009, background): “For instance, with respect to such a foundational, and in some respect simple, idea as the notion of a stimulus, Dewey (1896), well more than 100 years ago in his famous article about the concept of the reflex arc, pointed to the problems of how it was construed: If one is reading a book, if one is…”
The Theory of the Organism-Environment System as a Basis of Experimental Work in Psychology (2009, background): “Dewey (1896) maintained that the reflex approach did not solve the basic dualism of the introspectionist psychology but only replaced it with a dualism of peripheral and central structures, such that the relation between soul and body was transformed to a relation between stimulus and reaction. Acco”
Towards a Theory of Experience (2014, background): “This irreducibility of organism and environment in the study of behavior is a recurrent topic throughout Dewey’s writings, a unit that he already postulated in his early work (Dewey, 1896).”
Why do people get phished? Testing individual differences in phishing vulnerability within an integrated, information processing model (2011, background): “Early psychology research demonstrated that individual decisionmaking, rather than follow a direct path from stimulus (S) to response (R), followed a more complex trajectory through interpretation (I) (Dewey 1896; Rogers 2003) [15,42].”