Edward Lee Thorndike (1874-1949) was a professor of American Psychology, a disciple of William James who developed a series of laws about trial and error learning on a hungry cat. Edward Thorndike developed the first three laws of learning: Law of readiness, Law of exercise, and Law of effect.

The identical-elements theory of Thorndike helps in explaining this phenomenon of transfer. They claimed that the transfer of learning from one task to another task would occur when both tasks shared some kind of common or identical elements.

Thorndike's law of effect states that behaviors followed by a reward or reinforcement are more likely in the future, whereas behaviors followed by a punishment are less likely in the future. This basic principle is the foundation for many ideas and techniques in the behavioral perspective within educational psychology.

In Thorndike's puzzle box, animals were given a reward if they could get out of a special cage that required three steps to escape. When Thorndike put them back in the same cage, the animals did not need to go through the trial and error again, which proved that they had actually learned how to get out of the cage.