Winthrop Niles Kellogg

Winthrop Niles Kellogg (April 13, 1898 – June 22, 1972) was an American comparative psychologist who studied the behavior of a number of intelligent animal species.

Early life

Winthrop Niles Kellogg was born in 1898 in Mount Vernon, New York. He began undergraduate study in 1916 at Cornell University for one year before joining the Great War (World War I) in Europe. For two years he served as part of the American Expeditionary Forces in the US Army Air Service, earning him the prestigious Croix de Guerre. After the war, he returned to undergraduate study at Indiana University Bloomington. There he met Luella Dorothy Agger of Indianapolis, whom he would marry in 1920.

Kellogg graduated from Indiana in 1922 majoring in philosophy and psychology. Kellogg tried out several jobs, including a journalist, but was persuaded by Luella's uncle to have a go in academia. Kellogg followed this advice enrolling in the psychology program at Columbia University, where he would receive his Master's in 1927 and his doctorate just two years later in 1929. His doctorate was directed by Robert S. Woodworth and compared psychophysical methods. Even as a graduate student, Kellogg was a prolific researcher. He published four single-authored articles and one co-authored in 1928–29 in addition to his dissertation. He published an additional three articles in 1930 and another five in 1931. Kellogg sustained this level of activity throughout his academic career.

Indiana University At Indiana University Bloomington, Kellogg built a research laboratory for studying conditioned behavior in dogs. With help from colleagues and students, he established an extensive program to study the physiological and conditional responses of dogs with their cerebral cortex removed. The laboratory provided a great opportunity for students to get adequate training in experimental research and to work on specific research questions within a "well-defined research paradigm." were no different, and instead they were highlighting only parts of the whole situation of learning and argued that learning be defined as a function – a change in behavior – and not a structure – a change in the nervous system. he argued for the necessity of comparative developmental studies of humans and non-human primates. Kellogg was interested in determining the "relative influence of nature and nurture on behavior".

"Gua, treated as an human child, behaved like a human child except when the structure of her body and brain prevented her. This being shown, the experiment was discontinued."

A portion of the results was presented at the annual meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, and Kellogg began writing a book with Luella. The Ape and the Child was published in 1933. It documents the study very well.

Characteristic of Kellogg, he did so through experiments and careful observations. "The first two papers from the "Porpoise and Sonar" project were published in Science in 1952 and 1953, with Kohler as a co-author."

Two of the main questions with regard to bottle-nose navigation were whether bottlenose dolphins produce sounds serving as sonar signals and whether they decode the echoes bouncing back. To find the answers to these questions, a one-of-a-kind dolphin pool was created off of the Gulf of Mexico coast and two dolphins were obtained. He discovered they do produce "rapidly repeated clicking noises and bird-like whistles".

Personality Kellogg's personality is uniformly described by those who knew him. He had little tolerance for those he saw as unjust and unethical (despite running an experiment on his own son) and knew who "were the incompetents and scoundrels in science". He had great self-confidence. He was curt and professional, having little time for casual chatter. He was a workaholic and demanding. He had a good sense of humor. He had great energy and intensity, and "brought enthusiasm to much of what he did". While curt, he was approachable and sympathetic to student's problems "was one of the best, if not the best, classroom teachers they had experienced". He exhibited scientific rigor and precaution by controlling extraneous variables and leaving nothing to chance. Robert S. Daniel described Kellogg as part of "the old school of researchers who did everything they could think of to try to prove that their own hypotheses were wrong before they published results" (Daniel, Note 2)

One student noted: My feelings toward Kellogg were almost always positive. He had a really sweet side, and we struck up a father-son mentoring relationship, which was quite comforting and reassuring. Kellogg was a terrific lecturer with an extensive knowledge about a whole array of topics... His material was always extremely well-organized and comprehensive, almost always containing new and stimulating material. The more I got to know Kellogg, the more I tried to emulate his behavior, hoping to acquire the same self-confidence and flair that he exhibited, particularly when dealing with things of a scientific nature.

Another said: "For Kellogg, science was the product of natural curiosity. He spurned the value of theory because he felt it placed blinders on the scientist causing important findings to go unnoticed or at least to be misinterpreted." "He was a comparative psychologist and a student of animal behavior", as is clear from his research with Gua and Donald and his study of dolphin echolocation. In the realm of conditioning and learning he is noted for his work on spinal conditioning in dogs.

On January 22, 1982, Florida State University named its psychology research building the Kellogg Research Laboratory of Psychology.

Works Kellogg, W.N. I931a. A note on fear behavior in young rats, mice, and birds. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 12, pages 117–121. Kellogg, W.N. 1931b. Humanizing the ape. Psychological Review, 38, pages 160–176. Kellogg, W.N. 1931c. More about the 'wolf children' of India. American Journal of Psychology, 43, pages 508–509. Kellogg, W.N. 1932a. The influence of reading matter upon the effectiveness of adjacent advertisements. Journal of Applied Psychology, 16, pages 49–58. Kellogg, W.N. 1932b. The effect of emotional excitement upon muscular steadiness. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 15, pages 142–166. Kellogg, W.N., & Kellogg, L.A. (1932c). Comparative Tests on a Human and a Chimpanzee Infant of Approximately the Same Age, Part 2 (16-mm silent film). University Park: Pennsylvania State University, Psychol. Cinema Register. https://archive.org/details/comparative_tests_on_human_chimp_infants. Kellogg, W.N.1934. A further note on the 'wolf children' of India. American Journal of Psychology, 46, pages 149–150. Kellogg, W.N. 1938a. The Indiana conditioning laboratory. American Journal of Psychology, 51, pages 174–176. Kellogg, W.N. 1938b. An eclectic view of some theories of learning. Psychological Review, 45, pages 165–184. Kellogg, W.N. 1938c. Some objections to Professor Cason's definition of learning. Psychological Review, 45, pages 96–100. Kellogg, W.N. 1939. On the nature of skills – a reply to Mr. Lynch. Psychological Review, 46, pages 489–491. Kellogg, W.N. 1940. The superfluity of the Chappell critique – a reply. Psychological Review, 47, pages 95–97. Kellogg, W.N. 1941. A method for recording the activity of the human fetus in utero, with specimen results. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 58, pages 307–326. Kellogg, W.N. 1946. The learning curve for flying an airplane. Journal of Applied Psychology, 30, pages 435–441. Kellogg, W.N. 1952. "Anxiety" and conditioning in salt–water fishes. American Psychologist, 7, pages 279–280. Kellogg, W.N. 1961. Porpoises and sonar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kellogg, W.N. 1968a. Chimpanzees in experimental homes. The Psychological Record, 18, pages 489–498. Kellogg, W.N. 1968b. Communication and language in the home–raised chimpanzee. Science, 162, pages 423–427. Kellogg, W.N., & Britt, S.H. 1939. Structure or function in the definition of learning? Psychological Review, 46, pages 186–198. Kellogg, W.N., Deese, J., Pronko, N.H., & Feinberg, M. 1947. An attempt to condition the chronic spinal dog. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 37, pages 99–117. Kellogg, W.N., & Eagleson, B.M. 1931. The growth of social perception in different racial groups. Journal of Educational Psychology, 22, pages 367–375. Kellogg, W.N., & Kellogg, L.A. 1933. The ape and the child. New York: Whittlesey House (McGraw-Hill). Kellogg, W.N., & Payne, B. 1938. The true-false question as an aid in studying. Journal of Educational Psychology, 29, pages 581–589. Kellogg, W.N., & Pomeroy, W.B. 1936. Maze learning in water snakes. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 21, pages 275–295. Kellogg, W.N., & Rice, C.E. 1966. Visual discrimination and problem solving in a bottlenose dolphin. In K.S. Norris (Ed.), Whales, dolphins, and porpoises. Berkeley: University of California Press.