Robert Yerkes' multiple-choice apparatus, 1913-1939

Robert Yerkes developed a multiple-choice method to study ideational behavior in animals and humans using specially designed multiple-choice apparatuses. One example ofYerkes' apparatus, used for testing human subjects, now resides in the Historical Scientific Instruments Collection at the Peabody Museum of Natural History of Yale University. Yerkes introduced the apparatus in 1913 to show that the multiple-choice method was an effective measure of ideational behavior in normal and abnormal people. An analysis of the machine's construction and history brings to light Yerkes' desire for methodological rigor in experimental design. Yerkes' apparatus became commercially available in 1923 even though other psychological laboratories had been making their own versions of it since 1919. Sixteen years later, Yerkes' apparatus was still on the market despite an apparent lack of demand for it.     

Lloyd Morgan's theory of instinct: from Darwinism to neo-Darwinism.

Darwin's proposal of two sources of instinct--natural selection and inherited habit--fostered among late nineteenth century evolutionists a variety of conflicting notions concerning the mechanisms of evolution. The British comparative psychologist C. Lloyd Morgan was a cardinal figure in restructuring the orthodox Darwinian conception to relieve the confusion besetting it and to meet the demands of the new biology of Weismann. This paper traces the development of Morgan's ideas about instinct against the background of his philosophic assumptions and the views of instinct theorists from Darwin and Romanes to McDougall and Lorenz.