Learning and Behavior: A Contemporary Synthesis

Mark E. Bouton

2007
419 pages, 207 illustrations
casebound

About This Title

The considerable progress that has been made researching fundamental learning processes tells an important and interesting story. In this new book—written for undergraduates, graduate students, and curious professionals—Mark Bouton recounts that story, providing a strong background in modern learning and behavior theory that is informed by the history of the field. The text reflects the author’s conviction that the study of animal learning has a central place in psychology, and that understanding its principles and theories is important for students, psychologists, and scientists in related disciplines (e.g., behavioral neuroscience and clinical psychology).

Almost all of the chapters are organized to illustrate how knowledge is accumulated through the systematic development of theory and research. The book opens with a brief history that connects the modern issues with their philosophical and biological roots. The second chapter addresses the idea that basic learning processes are designed to help an organism adapt to a changing world; in the process, it introduces the reader to a wide range of interesting examples of learning. After analyzing some fundamental phenomena in Pavlovian learning, the book then provides a very clear and readable review of modern conditioning theories since the Rescorla-Wagner model, discusses memory retrieval and behavior-system processes that govern performance, and addresses the question (posed by research in the late 1960s and 1970s) of whether the laws of learning and behavior uncovered in the laboratory maze and Skinner box have generality—by studying learning in honey bees and categorization and causal judgments in humans. Instrumental learning is then discussed from various perspectives in chapters on behavior and its consequences (research in behavior analysis), how stimuli guide instrumental action (a survey of the field of animal cognition), and how motivation influences instrumental action. The final chapter reviews and integrates the major themes of the book, describing avoidance learning, learned helplessness, and related examples of learning before reviewing the modern cognitive and synthetic perspective on instrumental action.

Lively and current, Learning and Behavior: A Contemporary Synthesis engages students while illustrating the interconnectedness and excitement of modern research.

About the Author

Mark E. Bouton is a leading researcher in the field of animal learning, cognition, and behavior. He received his B.A. from Williams College and his Ph.D. from the University of Washington. He is currently a Professor of Psychology at the University of Vermont, where he has been teaching since 1980. For over 25 years, his research has investigated the relationships between context, conditioning, and memory, with a special emphasis on inhibitory processes like extinction. Some of his recent scientific writing has focused on the connections between modern learning theory, neuroscience, and issues in cognitive behavioral therapy (e.g., panic disorder, fear and anxiety, relapse after therapy). He has been a Fulbright Scholar, a James McKeen Cattell Scholar, a University Scholar at the University of Vermont, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford), and he is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science. He was Editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, the field’s most prestigious journal, from 1998 until 2003. He has taught an up-to-date course in Learning, which is now given away in his book, for 26 years.

Reviews and Commentary

“Mark E. Bouton, one of the most influential figures in modern learning research, has written a book that aims to convey to students the complex reality of his field. It is far more ambitious than the typical textbook because it tries not only to cover the basic facts found in all such works but also to show the reader the theoretical and methodological sophistication found in the contemporary world of learning theory. This book has to be considered a smashing success in both respects.”
—Robert L. Greene, PsycCRITIQUES

“In Learning and Behavior: A Contemporary Synthesis, Mark Bouton has created a student-friendly textbook for an undergraduate course in animal learning that is both comprehensive and current.”
—Darlene Skinner, Canadian Psychology/Psychologie canadienne

1. Learning Theory: What It Is and How It Got This Way

Philosophical Roots

Are people machines?
Associations and the contents of the mind

Biological Roots

Reflexes, evolution, and early comparative psychology
The rise of the conditioning experiment

A Science of Learning and Behavior

John B. Watson
B. F. Skinner
Edward C. Tolman
Computer and brain metaphors
Human learning and animal learning

Tools for Analyzing Learning and Behavior

Learning about stimuli and about behavior
Crows foraging at the beach
Kids at play
People using drugs
Relations between S, R, and S*

Summary

2. Learning and Adaptation

Evolution and Behavior

Natural selection
Adaptation in behavior
Fixed action patterns
Innate behavior

Adaptation in Instrumental Conditioning

The law of effect
Reinforcement
Shaping

Adaptation in Classical Conditioning

Signals for food
Territoriality and reproduction
Fear
Conditioning with drugs as S*s
Sign tracking

Other Parallels between Signal and Response Learning

Extinction
Timing of S*
Size of S*
Preparedness

Summary

3. The Nuts and Bolts of Conditioning

The Basic Conditioning Experiment

Pavlov's experiment
What is learned in conditioning?
Variations on the basic experiment

Methods for Studying Classical Conditioning

Eyeblink conditioning in rabbits
Fear conditioning in rats
Autoshaping in pigeons
Taste aversion learning in rats

Things That Affect the Strength of Conditioning

Time
Novelty of the CS and the US
Intensity of the CS and the US
Pseudoconditioning and sensitization

Conditioned Inhibition

How to detect conditioned inhibition
How to produce conditioned inhibition
Two methods that do NOT produce true inhibition

Information Value in Conditioning

CS-US contingencies in classical conditioning
Blocking and unblocking
Relative validity in conditioning

Summary

4. Theories of Conditioning

The Rescorla-Wagner Model

Blocking and unblocking
Extinction and inhibition
Other new predictions
CS-US contingencies
Summary: What does it all mean?

Some Problems with the Rescorla-Wagner Model

The extinction of inhibition
Latent inhibition
Another look at blocking

The Role of Attention in Conditioning

The Mackintosh model
The Pearce-Hall model
Summary: What does it all mean?

Short-Term Memory and Learning

Priming of the US
Priming of the CS
Habituation
Summary: What does it all mean?

Nodes, Connections, and Conditioning

Wagner’s “SOP” model
Sensory versus emotional US nodes
Elemental versus configural CS nodes
Summary: What does it all mean?

Summary

5. What Ever Happened to Behavior, Anyway?

Memory and Learning

How well is conditioning remembered?
Causes of forgetting
Remembering, forgetting, and extinction
Other examples of ambiguity and interference
Summary

The Modulation of Behavior

Occasion setting
Three properties of occasion setters
What is learned in occasion setting?
Configural conditioning
Other forms of modulation
Summary

Understanding the Nature of the Conditioned Response

Two problems for stimulus substitution
Understanding compensatory responses
Conditioning and behavior systems
An application to panic disorder
Conclusion

Summary

6. Are the Laws of Conditioning General?

Everything You Know Is Wrong
Special Characteristics of Flavor Aversion Learning

One-trial learning
Long-delay learning
Learned safety
Hedonic shift
Potentiation
Summary

Some Reasons Why Learning Laws May Be General

Evolution produces both generality and specificity
The generality of relative validity

Associative Learning in Honey Bees and Humans

Conditioning in bees
Category and causal learning in humans
Some disconnections between conditioning and human causal learning
Causes, effects, and causal power

Conclusion
Summary

7. Behavior and its Consequences

Basic Tools and Issues

Reinforcement vs. contiguity theory
Flexibility, purpose, and motivation
Operant psychology
Conditioned reinforcement

The Relationship between Behavior and Payoff

Different ways to schedule payoff
Choice
Choice is everywhere
Impulsiveness and self-control
Are reinforcers all alike? (behavioral economics)

Theories of Reinforcement

Drive reduction
The Premack principle
Problems with the Premack principle
Behavioral regulation theory
Selection by consequences

Summary

8. How Stimuli Guide Instrumental Action

Introduction
Categorization and Discrimination

Trees, water, and Margaret
Other categories
How do they do it?

Basic Processes of Generalization and Discrimination

The generalization gradient
Interactions between gradients
Perceptual learning
Mediated generalization and acquired equivalence
Summary

Another Look at the Information Processing System

Visual perception in pigeons
Attention
Working memory
Reference memory

The Cognition of Time

Time of day cues
Interval timing
How do they do it?

The Cognition of Space

Cues that guide spatial behavior
Spatial learning in the radial maze and water maze
How do they do it?

Summary

9. The Motivation of Instrumental Action

How Motivational States Affect Behavior

Motivation versus learning
Does drive merely energize?
Is motivated behavior a response to need?

Anticipating Reward and Punishment

Bait and switch
The Hullian response: Incentive motivation
Frustration
Intrinsic motivation: Another paradoxical reward effect
Partial reinforcement and persistence
Motivation by expectancies
What does it all mean?

Dynamic effects of motivating stimuli

Opponent-process theory
Emotions in social attachment
A further look at addiction

Summary

10. A Synthetic Perspective on Instrumental Action

Avoidance Learning

The puzzle and solution: Two-factor theory
Problems with two-factor theory
Species-Specific defense reactions
Cognitive factors in avoidance learning
Learned helplessness
Summary: What does it all mean?

Parallels in Appetitive Learning

The misbehavior of organisms
Superstition revisited
A general role for stimulus learning in response learning situations
Punishment
Summary: What does it all mean?

A Cognitive Analysis of Instrumental Action

Knowledge of the R-S* relation
Knowledge of the S-S* relation
S-(R-S*) learning (occasion setting)
S-R and “habit” learning

Summary

Media and Supplements

Student Website (www.sinauer.com/bouton)

The Learning and Behavior companion website (available free of charge) includes study resources to help students review the content of each chapter and test their understanding of the concepts presented in the textbook.The site contains the following elements: *Chapter Outlines *Chapter Summaries *Key terms *Glossary *Online quizzes (Adopting instructors must register online in order for their students to use this feature)

Instructor’s Resource CD (ISBN 978-0-87893-071-5), available to qualified adopters, includes:

Presentation Resources
All textbook figures (including photos) and tables are provided in both JPEG (high- and low-resolution) and PowerPoint^® formats. All images have been formatted and optimized for excellent legibility when projected.
Instructor’s Manual
Provided in both Word^® and PDF formats, the Learning and Behavior Instructor’s Manual includes the following sections for each chapter of the textbook: chapter learning objectives; chapter outline; key terms; class discussion questions and exercises; and suggested additional resources for lecture/course development.
Test Bank
A comprehensive set of exam questions, formatted both as Word^® files and in Brownstone's Diploma^® software (included), is provided for each chapter of the textbook, with approximately 60 multiple-choice and 10 short-answer questions per chapter.

Pricing and Options

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Learning and Behavior: A Contemporary Synthesis	978-0-87893-063-0	$99.95	Purchase	Request Exam Copy
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