Kenneth Wartinbee Spence was a prominent American psychologist known for both his theoretical and experimental contributions to learning theory and motivation.
11 Facts About Kenneth Spence
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Kenneth Spence spent his youth and adolescence there, attending West Hill High School in Notre Dame de Grace.
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Kenneth Spence sustained a back injury during a track competition while attending McGill University.
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Spence and Isabel later divorced, and Spence was remarried to Janet A Taylor, his graduate student, in 1960.
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Kenneth Spence eventually returned to McGill University and changed his major to psychology.
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Kenneth Spence applied to a postdoctoral fellowship to study mathematics after the completion of his graduate training, but his application was rejected by a biologist on the grounds that psychology would never reach a level of precision to require sophisticated mathematical knowledge.
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From this and further research, Kenneth Spence developed the continuous learning account of two-choice discrimination learning in rats.
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Kenneth Spence moved to the University of Iowa in 1938, and was appointed to the head of the psychology department in 1942.
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Unlike Hull, Kenneth Spence's formulation summed drive and incentive motivation instead of multiplying them.
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Kenneth Spence showed that the mathematical form of the curves obtained when probability of the conditioned response is plotted against successive presentations of the paired stimulus changes systematically with motivational level.
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Kenneth Spence directed a total of 75 PhD theses, producing faculty members in every major psychology department in the United States.