People (Births)

• 1919 – William Kaye Estes, American psychologist and academic (d. 2011).

William Kaye Estes

William Kaye Estes (17 June 1919 to 17 August 2011) was an American psychologist.

A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Estes as the 77th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. In order to develop a statistical explanation for the learning phenomena, William Kaye Estes developed the Stimulus Sampling Theory in 1950 which suggested that a stimulus-response association is learned on a single trial; however, the learning process is continuous and consists of the accumulation of distinct stimulus-response pairings.