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Although it is generally believed that the structuralist psychologist Edward B. Titchener opposed comparative psychology, he actually supported it as long as it was kept separate from his psychology of the normal adult human mind. Furthermore, early in his career Titchener published 10 rarely cited articles in comparative psychology. These deal with the ability of birds to coordinate the color of their nests and eggs to gain protection by camouflage, the comparative palatability of different species of insects, the function of pectination (the serrated edges of bird claws), and mate choice by sexual selection. Titchener's early work in comparative psychology merits recognition.
Edward Bradford Titchener (1867-1927) was among the most active and powerful psychologists during the formative years of academic psychology in the United States. Titchener's Cornell University program in experimental psychology was among the very few elite programs of the time.
It is generally believed that Titchener rejected work in fields that are today developmental, abnormal, and comparative psychology. His experimental psychology was, indeed, the psychology of the normal adult human mind. However, although Titchener rejected other approaches as valid aspects of his experimental psychology, he often supported work in these fields, as long as they were kept distinct from his experimental psychology. Thus, Evans (1990) writes that "Titchener actively promoted animal psychology.... He was largely responsible for the Macmillan Company's publication of Margaret Washburn's Animal Mind and Robert M. Yerkes's Dancing Mouse" (p. 19). Expressed in Titchener's own words, "Personally, then, I welcome the animals, both for my own sake and theirs" (Titchener, 1910, p. 419). Titchener believed that psychologists were better trained in methodology and were better able than biologists to study animal behavior. He noted that "until such time, therefore, as experimental psychology forms a recognized part of every man's biological training, . . . the place for the animals who are to reveal the range and character of their mental endowment is the psychological laboratory" (p. 420).
Margaret Floy Washburn, who is best remembered for her classic textbook in comparative psychology, The Animal Mind (Washburn, 1908), was Titchener's first doctoral student. Animal research was conducted in the Cornell laboratories. Psychology's foremost historian, Edwin G. Boring, published a study of phototropisms in planarians (Boring, 1912). Boring (1961) called I. Madison...