Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 May 2019
At the end of the nineteenth century, Darwinian interests in animal behavior converged with experimental psychology to give rise to systematic research on learning in animals. For the first half of the twentieth century, Ivan Pavlov’s study of conditioned reflexes was a major influence, but many American researchers maintained the behaviorist claim that all learning is based on stimulus–response (S–R) habits. A major critic of this dominant tradition emphasized spatial learning, suggesting that conditioning procedures produce expectancies rather than habits. Another kind of attack on S–R theory concentrated on its claim that learning processes were the same for all species. The comparative approach investigated ways in which, for example, the learning capacities of primates differed from those of rats or even goldfish. Other researchers investigated biological constraints on what animals can learn and the way that learning depends on a researcher’s choice of stimuli and responses, as in the study of conditioned taste aversions. Several key discoveries in the late 1960s laid the foundations for new associative theories of learning and a revival of interest in cognitive processes like attention. These approaches, together with breakthroughs in research on neural bases of behavior, have dominated research on animal learning ever since.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.