[1] There, Spence attended LaCrosse Teacher's College and majored in Physical Education, and met his future wife Isabel Temte.
[1][4] While at Yale, Spence collaborated with Walter Shipley to test Clark L. Hull's blind alley maze learning in rats, a contribution which led to further publications while pursuing his PhD.
[4] After his PhD, Spence accepted a position as National Research Council at Yale Laboratories of Primate Biology[1][4] in Orange Park, Florida from 1933 to 1937.
[4] As reported by Lashley (1929), rats in a two-choice discrimination task demonstrated an extended period of chance performance, followed by a sudden leap to a high percentage of accurate responding.
[2] Lashley explained this phenomenon by suggesting that the rat's essential learning emerged from testing and confirming the correct hypothesis "during the rapidly changing portion of the function, with the practice preceding and the errors following being irrelevant to the final solution.
[4] There, Spence established an eyelid-conditioning lab to study the influence of motivation on classical conditioning, and contributed to Clark Hull's seminal Principles of Behavior book.
He showed also 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.