Peter Dews was a Harvard scientist who worked mostly on the interaction between drugs and behavior. He had a general interest in learning, though, and his octopus experiment did not involve drugs at all. Dews was influenced by his Harvard colleague B. F. Skinner, whose work on “operant conditioning”—the learning of behaviors by reward and punishment—had revolutionized psychology. The idea that successful behaviors will be repeated and unsuccessful ones abandoned had been pioneered by Edward Thorndike around 1900, but Skinner developed the idea in great detail. Dews, with many others, was
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