- Born:
- February 3, 1867, Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.
- Died:
- February 14, 1923, Chicago, Illinois (aged 56)
Charles Henry Turner
-
Who was Charles Henry Turner?
Charles Henry Turner (1867–1923) was an American behavioral scientist and a pioneer in the study of insect behavior. He showed that insects can modify their behavior based on experience. Turner was also known as a civil rights advocate who worked to overcome racial barriers in academia.
Turner graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a B.S. in biology in 1891 and an M.S. the following year. In 1907, he earned a Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Chicago.
Over his 33-year career, Turner published over 70 papers while facing challenges such as limited access to laboratories and heavy teaching loads. Despite these obstacles, his research made significant contributions to the understanding of invertebrate learning and behavior.
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What kind of scientist was Charles Henry Turner?
Charles Henry Turner (1867–1923) was an American behavioral scientist and pioneer in insect behavior study. His work demonstrated that social insects could modify behavior through experience. Turner earned a B.S. and M.S. in biology from the University of Cincinnati and a Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Chicago. Despite facing racial barriers, he published over 70 papers and held teaching positions at institutions such as Clark College and Sumner High School. Turner's research included designing apparatuses and conducting experiments on insect navigation, learning, and color recognition. He also contributed to civil rights, advocating for education to change racist behaviors.
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Which animals did Charles Henry Turner study?
Charles Henry Turner studied various animals, including ants, cockroaches, honeybees, and other invertebrates. His work included morphological studies of vertebrates and invertebrates. Turner designed mazes for ants and cockroaches and used colored disks and boxes to test the visual abilities of honeybees. He also performed experiments on insect navigation, death feigning, and invertebrate learning.
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What important discoveries did Turner make about insect behavior?
Charles Henry Turner was an American behavioral scientist and early pioneer in the field of insect behavior. He showed that social insects could modify their behavior as a result of experience.
Turner designed apparatuses to study insect behavior and conducted experiments on insect navigation, death feigning, and invertebrate learning. He may have been the first to investigate Pavlovian conditioning in an invertebrate. He also discovered that cockroaches could retain avoidance behavior even when transferred to a different apparatus. Turner was also one of the first behavioral scientists to pay close attention to the use of controls and variables in experiments.
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How did Turner's research change how people thought about animal intelligence?
Charles Henry Turner's research significantly shifted perspectives on insect behavior. Challenging the 19th-century concepts of taxis and kinesis, which viewed social insects as organisms that respond to specific stimuli, Turner demonstrated that insects can modify their behavior based on experience.
Through meticulous experiments, including designing mazes for ants and cockroaches and using colored disks to test honeybees' visual abilities, Turner showed the importance of controlled variables in experiments. His work revealed insights into insect navigation, learning, and pattern recognition. Turner may have been the first to investigate Pavlovian conditioning in an invertebrate. His work established that social insects can modify their behaviour as a result of experience.
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What obstacles did Charles Henry Turner face as an African American scientist in his time?
As an African American behavioral scientist and early pioneer in the field of insect behavior, Charles Henry Turner faced several obstacles during his career. Despite his advanced degrees and numerous publications, he struggled to find employment at a major U.S. university, possibly due to racism. He experienced restrictions on his access to laboratories and research libraries, as well as time constraints due to a heavy teaching load. Turner also received meager pay and was not given the opportunity to train research students at either the undergraduate or the graduate level.
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Charles Henry Turner (born February 3, 1867, Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.—died February 14, 1923, Chicago, Illinois) was an American behavioral scientist and early pioneer in the field of insect behaviour. He is best known for his work showing that social insects can modify their behaviour as a result of experience. Turner is also well known for his commitment to civil rights and for his attempts to overcome racial barriers in American academia.
Turner’s birthplace of Cincinnati had established a progressive reputation for African American opportunity and advancement. In 1886, after his graduation as class valedictorian from Gaines High School, he enrolled in the University of Cincinnati to pursue a B.S. degree in biology. Turner graduated in 1891; he remained at the University of Cincinnati and earned an M.S. degree, also in biology, the following year. In 1887 he married Leontine Troy.
Despite having an advanced degree and more than 20 publications to his credit, Turner found it difficult to find employment at a major U.S. university, possibly as a result of racism or his preference to work with young African American students. He held teaching positions at various schools, including Clark College (now Clark Atlanta University), a historically black college in Atlanta, from 1893 to 1905. He returned to school to earn a Ph.D. in zoology (magna cum laude) in 1907 from the University of Chicago. After Leontine died in 1895, Turner married Lillian Porter. In 1908 Turner finally settled in St. Louis, Missouri, as a science teacher at Sumner High School. He remained there until his retirement in 1922.
During his 33-year career, Turner published more than 70 papers, many of them written while he confronted numerous challenges, including restrictions on his access to laboratories and research libraries and restrictions on his time due to a heavy teaching load at Sumner. Furthermore, Turner received meagre pay and was not given the opportunity to train research students at either the undergraduate or the graduate level. Despite these challenges, he published several morphological studies of vertebrates and invertebrates.
Turner also designed apparatuses (such as mazes for ants and cockroaches and coloured disks and boxes for testing the visual abilities of honeybees), conducted naturalistic observations, and performed experiments on insect navigation, death feigning, and basic problems in invertebrate learning. Turner may have been the first to investigate Pavlovian conditioning in an invertebrate. In addition, he developed novel procedures to study pattern and colour recognition in honeybees (Apis), and he discovered that cockroaches trained to avoid a dark chamber in one apparatus retained the behaviour when transferred to a differently shaped apparatus. At the time, the study of insect behaviour was dominated by 19th-century concepts of taxis and kinesis, in which social insects are seen to alter their behaviour in specific responses to specific stimuli. Through his observations Turner was able to establish that insects can modify their behaviour as a result of experience.
Turner was one of the first behavioral scientists to pay close attention to the use of controls and variables in experiments. In particular, he was aware of the importance of variables called training variables, which influence performance. One such example of a training variable is the “intertrial interval,” which is the time that occurs between learning experiences. Reviews by Turner on invertebrate behaviour appeared in such important publications as Psychological Bulletin and the Journal of Animal Behavior. In 1910 Turner was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences of St. Louis. The French naturalist Victor Cornetz later named the circling movements of ants returning to their nest tournoiement de Turner (“Turner circling”), a phenomenon based on one of Turner’s previous discoveries.
Turner maintained a lifelong commitment to civil rights, first publishing on this issue in 1897. As a leader of the civil rights movement in St. Louis, he passionately argued that only through education can the behaviour of both black and white racists be changed. He suggested that racism could be studied within the framework of comparative psychology, and his animal research intimated the existence of two forms of racism. One form is based on an unconditioned response to the unfamiliar, whereas the other is based on principles of learning such as imitation.
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