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Learning: A Behavioral, Cognitive, and Evolutionary Synthesis provides an integrated account of the psychological processes involved in learning and conditioning and their influence on human behavior. With a skillful blend of behavioral, cognitive, and evolutionary themes, the text explores various types of learning as adaptive specialization that evolved through natural selection. Robust pedagogy and relevant examples bring concepts to life in this unique and accessible approach to the field.
The Representations of Knowledge in Pavlovian Conditioning
The Representations of Knowledge in Pavlovian Conditioning
If causal inference is the process by which individuals learn about predictors of important events, how is that knowledge encoded? Following Hume (1739/1992, 1777/1993), we believe that causal inferences are encoded as connections or associations between the mental representations of the inferred cause and effect, where a representation of an experienced environmental event is a mapping of that event into a neural code (Gallistel, 1990a, 1990b; Roitblat, 1987). Because we cannot directly observe internal representations or the associative links between them, there is continuing controversy about the nature of representations, whether they even exist, and the role they play in behavior (Anderson, 1990; Donahue & Palmer, 1994; Gallistel, 1990a, 1990b; Roitblat, ...
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