Herbert S. Terrace

all? None at all.

In 1975, I... was lucky enough to get a summer postdoc in the pigeon lab of Herb Terrace at Columbia University.

And Columbia was a huge operant psychology department at one time.

And that was started by Fred Keller, who went to Harvard with Skinner.

Remember, he was a student of Skinner.

And so...

In my career, I've been mentored by three Skinner students, Herb Terrace, Matthew Israel, the director of JRC, and Ogden Lindsley.

Ogden Lindsley had the biggest effect on my life.

And to see why one lab is a problem, why the whole field learned to stop trusting exactly in this kind of evidence, we need to also meet a chimp named Nim and the man who tried to get him to talk.

Herbert Terrace wasn't out to debunk talking monkeys.

Quite the opposite.

He was a Columbia psychologist who set out to show that apes could learn language and to prove Noam Chomsky wrong.