Learning and Complex Behavior

By David C. Palmer, John Donshoe, John W. Donahoe

Book Overview

Written from the perspective of selectionist theory, this text presents a theoretically integrated approach to the study of animal learning and human cognition that co-ordinates behavioural research... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0205139965
• ISBN13: 9780205139965
• Release Date: October 1993
• Publisher: Allyn & Bacon
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.0" x 7.3"

Customer Reviews

What psychology is all about.

Donahoe and Palmer's book represents the Holy Grail of psychology, a rigorous and empirically sound explanation of how human behavior is shaped by experience and the actual neural processes that translate and shape that experience. Integrating the separate methodologies of operant and classical conditioning (behaviorism), cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and neuropsychology, D & P have created a synthetic explanation of how human behavior derives from the complex interplay of informative (i.e., environmental) and neuro-biological events. This bio-behavioral approach is behavioristic because it focuses on how information (or environmental contingencies) may be mapped to behavior, but it notably expands behavioristic doctrine by demonstrating that overt behavior is but one aspect of a bio-behavioral system that includes not just overt but covert (neural) behavior.D & P's signal accomplishment is their unified principle of reinforcement. Common sense, as well as traditional behavioristic doctrine tells us that behavior occurs because it is either metaphorically pulled from (as in a conditioned reflex like salivation)or is 'glued' to us (as when we receive a monetary reward for a job well done). Similarly, humanistic and social psychology demarcate motivational processes into intrinsic and extrinsic components that are also ultimately derived from the premise that behavior is governed by two response systems. D & P demolish this well established conception, and demonstrate that all learning derives from unitary reinforcement processes that employ near identical neo-cortical and midbrain structures. Reinforcement according to D & P occus when the environmental control of behavior changes, or in other words, when we perceive some discrepancy in our behavior that demands a shifting of attention. On the neural level, this discrepancy is marked by the release of the neuromodulator dopamine that increases synaptic or neural efficacy. D & P's discrepancy model of reinforcement depicts reinforcement as a change in an environmental-behavior relationship that may or may not engage overt behavior. In other words, reinforcement occurs virtually when changes in environmental-behavior relationships are modeled in the brain. Put most simply, we are reinforced when we consider behavioral discrepancies that represent in turn the changing possibilities of existence. In a poetic sense, maxmimized reinforcement occurs when we maximize our hopes and dreams. If happiness is presumed to be maximizing the reinforcers in our lives, and if reinforcers are virtual, not real, then the role model for the happy life is not a bored Charles Foster Kane in his art filled Gothic mausoleum, but a penniless Shakespeare in Love. In an intellectual world increasingly challenged by the intellectual trendiness of selfish genes and conspicuous conception, it is refreshing that the implications of empirical psychology need not always be banal.Bu