Herbert S. Terrace

Herbert S. Terrace (born 29 November 1936) is a professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at Columbia University.

His interest in science was instilled by an older sister, Dr. Dorothy Krieger, who won a Lasker Award for her research in endocrinology.

[9] At Harvard, he was a USPHS Pre-Doctoral Fellow (1959–1961)[10] Learning by trial and error is a basic feature of conditioning theory.

The teaching machine introduces a new topic with simple questions that are gradually made more difficult.

[13] Terrace joined other leading behaviorists challenging Noam Chomsky's theory that only humans can learn language and grammar.

[4] Initially, Terrace hoped that combinations of a chimpanzee's signs would provide evidence that it could create a sentence.

To answer the first question, Terrace cited recent discoveries by developmental psychologists who showed that infants experience two non-verbal relations with their caretakers, intersubjectivity and joint attention, before they learn to name objects.

[4] To answer the second question, Terrace integrated hypotheses by an anthropologist[17] and a linguist[18] who suggested that the caloric requirements of Homo erectus’ large brain was the motivation for their invention of words.

Chomsky argued that grammar was the result of a recent mutation[19] and that the origin of words remained a mystery.

[22] When learning a sequence by the simultaneous training paradigm, monkeys were shown an array of photographs on a touch-sensitive video display.

As a result, subjects could not rely on its physical location as an external cue for determining to which photograph it should respond first, second, and so on.

[22][23] Because the simultaneous training paradigm requires the subject to represent each item's ordinal position, it provides an opportunity to study animal cognition.

In 1985, Terrace began a primate cognition laboratory in which he studied how monkeys use representations in various serial learning tasks, for example, to respond in the correct order to ascending and descending series of numerically defined stimuli,[24] to acquire serial expertise [the ability to become progressively better at learning arbitrary sequences][25] and to imitate another monkey's sequential performance.

Since 1962, Terrace's research has been funded by grants from the NIH, NSF and the James McDonnell Foundation.