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Project Pigeon
During World War II, Project Pigeon (later Project Orcon, for "organic control") was American behaviorist B. F. Skinner's attempt to develop a pigeon-controlled guided bomb. Overview The testbed was the same National Bureau of Standards-developed, unpowered airframe that was later used for the US Navy's radar-guided "Bat" glide bomb, which was basically a small glider, with wings and tail surfaces, an explosive warhead section in the center, and a "guidance section" in the nose cone. The intent was to train pigeons to act as "pilots" for the device, using their cognitive abilities to recognize the target. The guidance system consisted of three lenses mounted in the nose of the vehicle, which projected an image of the target on a screen mounted in a small compartment inside the nose cone. This screen was mounted on pivots and fitted with sensors that measured any angular movement. One to three pigeons, trained by operant conditioning to recognize the target, were statione ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Behaviorism
Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understand the behavior of humans and other animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex elicited by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual's history, including especially reinforcement and punishment contingencies, together with the individual's current motivational state and controlling stimuli. Although behaviorists generally accept the important role of heredity in determining behavior, deriving from Skinner's two levels of selection: phylogeny and ontogeny. they focus primarily on environmental events. The cognitive revolution of the late 20th century largely replaced behaviorism as an explanatory theory with cognitive psychology, which unlike behaviorism views internal mental states as explanations for observable behavior. Behaviorism emerged in the early 1900s as a reaction to depth psychology and other traditional forms of psychology, which often had diffic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Verbal Behavior
''Verbal Behavior'' is a 1957 book by psychologist B. F. Skinner, in which he describes what he calls verbal behavior, or what was traditionally called linguistics. Skinner's work describes the controlling elements of verbal behavior with terminology invented for the analysis - ''echoics, mands, tacts, autoclitics'' and others - as well as carefully defined uses of ordinary terms such as ''audience''. Origins The origin of ''Verbal Behavior'' was an outgrowth of a series of lectures first presented at the University of Minnesota in the early 1940s and developed further in his summer lectures at Columbia and William James lectures at Harvard in the decade before the book's publication. Research Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior drew heavily on methods of literary analysis. This tradition has continued. The book ''Verbal Behavior'' is almost entirely theoretical, involving little experimental research in the work itself. Many research papers and applied extensions based o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Psychology Experiments
Experimental psychology is the work done by those who apply experimental methods to psychological study and the underlying processes. Experimental psychologists employ human participants and animal subjects to study a great many topics, including (among others) sensation, perception, memory, cognition, learning, motivation, emotion; developmental processes, social psychology, and the neural substrates of all of these. History Early experimental psychology Wilhelm Wundt Experimental psychology emerged as a modern academic discipline in the 19th century when Wilhelm Wundt introduced a mathematical and experimental approach to the field. Wundt founded the first psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany. Other experimental psychologists, including Hermann Ebbinghaus and Edward Titchener, included introspection in their experimental methods. Charles Bell Charles Bell was a British physiologist whose main contribution to the medical and scientific community was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Military Animals Of World War II
A military, also known collectively as armed forces, is a heavily armed, highly organized force primarily intended for warfare. Militaries are typically authorized and maintained by a sovereign state, with their members identifiable by a distinct military uniform. They may consist of one or more military branches such as an army, navy, air force, space force, marines, or coast guard. The main task of a military is usually defined as defence of their state and its interests against external armed threats. In broad usage, the terms "armed forces" and "military" are often synonymous, although in technical usage a distinction is sometimes made in which a country's armed forces may include other paramilitary forces such as armed police. Beyond warfare, the military may be employed in additional sanctioned and non-sanctioned functions within the state, including internal security threats, crowd control, promotion of political agendas, emergency services and reconstruction, pro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
World War II Weapons Of The United States
The world is the totality of entities, the whole of reality, or everything that exists. The nature of the world has been conceptualized differently in different fields. Some conceptions see the world as unique, while others talk of a "plurality of worlds". Some treat the world as one simple object, while others analyze the world as a complex made up of parts. In scientific cosmology, the world or universe is commonly defined as "the totality of all space and time; all that is, has been, and will be". Theories of modality talk of possible worlds as complete and consistent ways how things could have been. Phenomenology, starting from the horizon of co-given objects present in the periphery of every experience, defines the world as the biggest horizon, or the "horizon of all horizons". In philosophy of mind, the world is contrasted with the mind as that which is represented by the mind. Theology conceptualizes the world in relation to God, for example, as God's creation, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Animal Training
Animal training is the act of teaching animals specific responses to specific conditions or stimuli. Training may be for purposes such as companionship, detection, protection, and entertainment. The type of training an animal receives will vary depending on the training method used, and the purpose for training the animal. For example, a seeing eye dog will be trained to achieve a different goal than a wild animal in a circus. In some countries animal trainer certification bodies exist. They do not share consistent goals or requirements; they do not prevent someone from practicing as an animal trainer nor using the title. Similarly, the United States does not require animal trainers to have any specific certification. An animal trainer should consider the natural behaviors of the animal and aim to modify behaviors through a basic system of reward and punishment. Methods The behavioral approach Principles During training, an animal trainer can administer one of four pot ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Blue Peacock
Blue Peacock, renamed from Blue Bunny and originally Brown Bunny, was a British tactical nuclear weapon project in the 1950s. The project's goal was to store a number of ten-kiloton nuclear land mines in Germany. These mines were intended to be placed on the North German Plain and detonated by wire or an eight-day timer in the event of Soviet invasion from the east. Design Blue Peacock was designed after the free-falling Blue Danube and weighed 7.2 long tons (7,300 kg). A total of two firing units were built: the casing and the warhead. Due to its large steel casing, it had to be tested outdoors in a flooded gravel pit near Sevenoaks in Kent. Since the bomb would be unattended, anti-tampering devices were also used. The casing was pressurized, and pressure and tilt switches were added. The warhead could be detonated via three methods: a wire located away, an eight-day timer, or anti-tampering devices. Once armed, Blue Peacock would detonate ten seconds after being moved, if ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
War Pigeon
Homing pigeon, Homing pigeons have long played an important role in war. Due to their homing ability, speed, and altitude, they were often used as military messengers. Carrier pigeons of the Racing Homer breed were used to carry messages in World War I and World War II, and 32 such pigeons were presented with the Dickin Medal. Medals such as the Croix de Guerre, awarded to Cher Ami, and the Dickin Medal awarded to the pigeons G.I. Joe (pigeon), G.I. Joe and Paddy (pigeon), Paddy, amongst 32 others, have been awarded to pigeons for their services in saving human lives. During World War I and World War II, carrier pigeons were used by the Australian, French, German, United States Army Pigeon Service, American, and UK forces, to transport messages back to their home coop behind the lines. When they landed, wires in the coop would sound a bell or buzzer and a soldier of the Royal Corps of Signals, Signal Corps would know a message had arrived. The soldier would go to the coop, remove ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pigeon Intelligence
Pigeons have featured in numerous experiments in comparative psychology, including experiments concerned with animal cognition, and as a result there is considerable knowledge of pigeon intelligence. Available data show, for example, that: *Pigeons have the capacity to share attention between different dimensions of a stimulus, but (like humans and other animals) their performance with multiple dimensions is worse than with a single stimulus dimension. *Pigeons can be taught relatively complex actions and response sequences, and can learn to make responses in different sequences. *Pigeons readily learn to respond in the presence of one simple stimulus and withhold responding in the presence of a different stimulus, or to make different responses in the presence of different stimuli. *Pigeons can discriminate between other individual pigeons, and can use the behaviour of another individual as a cue to tell them what response to make. *Pigeons readily learn to make discriminative re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Military Animals
Military animals are trained animals that are used in warfare and other combat related activities. As working animals, different military animals serve different functions. Horses, elephants, camels, and other animals have been used for both transportation and mounted attack. Pigeons were used for communication and photographic espionage. Many other animals have been reportedly used in various specialized military functions, including rats and pigs. Dogs have long been employed in a wide variety of military purposes, more recently focusing on guarding and bomb detection, and along with dolphins and sea lions are in active use today. Use For transportation and hauling * The horse was the most widely used animal throughout the recorded history of warfare. Early mounts could pull a chariot or carry lightly armored skirmishing forces. With the appearance of heavier mounts and the invention of the stirrup, the horse-mounted cavalry became the most prestigious combat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ethology
Ethology is a branch of zoology that studies the behavior, behaviour of non-human animals. It has its scientific roots in the work of Charles Darwin and of American and German ornithology, ornithologists of the late 19th and early 20th century, including Charles Otis Whitman, Charles O. Whitman, Oskar Heinroth, and Wallace Craig. The modern discipline of ethology is generally considered to have begun during the 1930s with the work of the Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen and the Austrian biologists Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch, the three winners of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Ethology combines laboratory and field science, with a strong relation to neuroanatomy, ecology, and evolutionary biology. Etymology The modern term ''ethology'' derives from the Greek language: wikt:ἦθος, ἦθος, ''ethos'' meaning "character" and , ''wikt:-logia, -logia'' meaning "the study of". The term was first popularized by the American entomologist William Mo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bat Bomb
Bat bombs were an experimental World War II weapon developed by the United States. The bomb consisted of a bomb-shaped casing with over a thousand compartments, each containing a hibernating Mexican free-tailed bat with a small, timed incendiary bomb attached. Dropped from a bomber at dawn, the casings would deploy a parachute in mid-flight and open to release the bats, which would then disperse and roost in eaves and attics in a . The incendiaries, which were set on timers, would then ignite and start fires in inaccessible places in the largely wood and paper constructions of the Japanese cities that were the weapon's intended target. The United States Navy took control in August 1943, using the code name ProjectX-Ray. Conception The bat bomb was conceived by Lytle S. Adams (1881–1970), a dental surgeon from Irwin, Pennsylvania, who was an acquaintance of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. The inspiration for Adams' suggestion was a trip he took to Carlsbad Caverns National ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
