Table of Contents
What was Margaret Washburn’s theory on animal consciousness?
She acknowledged the danger of anthropomorphism and took precautions to account for it as a potential source of error, but she insisted that, using the analogy of human conscious experience, it was possible to infer the minds of non-human animals from their behavior. The theory is that conscious experience aids an animal in separating changes brought on by its own actions from changes brought on by the outside environment.These states are under the control of particular regions of the brain, such as the lower brain stem in mammals. So, most animals are conscious in the sense of being awake.Three aspects of animal behavior—communication, play, and the use of tools—intersect to form the basis of human consciousness. Based on anticipatory behavioral control, which is present in all complex forms of animal life, these three elements interact with one another.
What was the finding of Margaret Floy Washburn?
Washburn created a motor theory of consciousness as a result of her fascination with fundamental mechanisms. She developed the theory to its fullest extent in her 1916 book Movement and Mental Imagery. She incorporated the introspective experimental approach there, putting a focus on motor functions. History of motor behavior Five common themes in motor learning include individual differences, practice distribution, transfer of training, retention, and knowledge of results.These were psychology and neurophysiology. Any theory of motor control must be able to take into consideration the following four aspects of human behavior: flexibility, uniqueness, consistency, and modifiability.Paul Fitts and Michael Posner first described this highly valued aspect of motor learning in 1967. Three stages of learning motor skills—a cognitive phase, an associative phase, and an autonomous phase—were proposed by renowned psychologists in their book Human Performance.The fundamental tenet of motor theories of consciousness is that all awareness is fundamentally dependent on motor response; consciousness is not simply a correlate of cortical activity but rather is inherently a reaction, operating in terms of full sensori-motor arcs, with the motor part of each arc functioning as just a dot.The main theories of motor control—motor programming theory, systems theory, theory of dynamic action, theory of parallel distributed processing—as well as the variables affecting motor learning and its applications in neurorehabilitation—are all discussed.