KONORSKI, JERZY (1903-1973)

Although Jerzy Konorski always regarded himself as a neurophysiologist, his empirical and theoretical legacy has been in psychology. Like those of the Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov, Konorski's theories, although expressed in terms of speculative physiology, were largely based on behavioral experiments and are readily recast into psychological concepts. And it is in this form that his ideas have come to exert a preeminent influence over the contemporary study of associative learning through conditioning.

Konorski was born in the Polish city of Lódz. From his earliest student days, he was fascinated by brain function, and while studying medicine at Warsaw University, he came into contact with Pavlov's work. Although inspired by Pavlov's ideas, he doubted that Pavlovian mechanisms could explain all forms of acquired behavior, especially instrumental or operant conditioning. Along with a fellow student, Stephan Miller, he set up a makeshift conditioning laboratory to investigate whether instrumental and classical (Pavlovian) conditioning obey the same principles of reinforcement. On the basis of this work, Miller and Konorski (1969) published the first statement of the distinction between the two forms of conditioning in 1928, while they were still students. The existence and importance of this distinction was not realized in the West until Konorski and Miller entered into a published debate with B. F. Skinner on the matter in the next decade.

Their subsequent work on instrumental conditioning, conducted in Pavlov's laboratory between 1931 and 1933, and subsequently at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology in Warsaw, was unknown in the West before World War II. Their studies of both modulatory and conditioned reinforcing effects of Pavlovian stimuli on instrumental conditioning led them to a two-process theory that was not approximated in the West until the 1960s. Their analysis of avoidance conditioning still stands.

Ignorance of Konorski and Miller's work before World War II is understandable, for the presentation of this research in English had to await the publication of Konorski's monograph Conditioned Reflexes and Neuron Organization (1948). The neglect of this volume is less comprehensible, however, for in it Konorski presented the first detailed connectionist account of conditioning within the framework of a Sherringtonian conception of the central nervous system. Aside from its pioneering a connectionist approach to learning, two aspects of Konorski's 1948 theory deserve special mention. The first is his treatment of conditioned inhibition. Although inhibitory processes were studied intensively in Pavlov's laboratory, their importance was not recognized in the West until the 1960s. When research on this topic finally got under way in the West, Konorski's conception of an inhibitory connection was incorporated into current theories of conditioning.

The second notable feature of Konorski's theory, which has not yet received due recognition, is the rules that he outlined for changing connection weights. Konorski (1948, p. 106) suggested that a positive increment in an excitatory connection weight occurs when activity in an input element is paired with a rise in activity in the receptor element. Correspondingly, inhibitory connections are strengthened when input element activity is paired with a fall in the activation of the receptor element. The importance of these suggestions is that they provide a way of implementing in connectionist terms the error-correcting learning rules (e.g., the Rescorla-Wagner rule) that have come to dominate current theories of associative learning.

When Konorski returned to Poland immediately after World War II, he was instrumental in reestablishing the Nencki Institute, first as the head of the Department of Neurophysiology and later as its director. His enthusiasm and dedication to behavioral neuroscience are clear from the recollections of some of his students, published in his memorial issue of the institute's journal, Acta neurobiologiae experimentalis (Zernicki, 1974), which contains a full bibliography. Unfortunately, his research activity was constrained at that time by the promulgation of Pavlovian orthodoxy in the later years of Russian dictator Joseph Stalin's reign, because his 1948 monograph was regarded as a revisionist text.

Stalin's death eventually loosened these intellectual shackles and allowed Konorski to establish contacts with American researchers. These contacts had a profound influence on him and culminated in the publication of Integrative Activity of the Brain (1967). The scope of this book was ambitious, attempting to describe the brain mechanisms subserving not just learning and conditioning but also perception, cognition, motivation, and emotion—indeed, the overall integration of these functions. Although replete with many interesting and perceptive ideas, this volume is less satisfactory than the first book. Its theoretical substance is too dependent upon the neuroscientific theories and claims of the time, many of which have suffered at the hands of subsequent research. Moreover, its scope precluded one of the most elegant and impressive features of the earlier book, the attempt to achieve a detailed concordance between theory and data.

When Konorski died in 1973, Western psychology had just begun to appreciate his legacy. His influence on research in conditioning and associative learning rivals that of Pavlov and the neobehaviorists (see Dickinson and Boakes, 1979).

See also:CONDITIONING, CLASSICAL AND INSTRUMENTAL

Bibliography

Dickinson, A., and Boakes, R. A., eds. (1979). Mechanisms of learning and motivation: A memorial volume to Jerzy Konorski. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Konorski, J. (1948). Conditioned reflexes and neuron organization. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

—— (1967). Integrative activity of the brain: An interdisciplinary approach. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Miller, S., and Konorski, J. (1969). On a particular form of conditioned reflex. Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior 12, 187-189. English translation by B. F. Skinner from the original French publication (1928).

Zernicki, B., ed. (1974). Acta neurobiologiae experimentalis 34 (6).

AnthonyDickinson