Temporal Learning

This chapter discusses the history of the problem of temporal learning. There is also a discussion about the work in progress on it that is intended to : (1)describe a set of rather elegant experimental data that are probably novel to most psychologists and cognitive scientists, (2) show how dynamic modeling helps to appreciate the remarkable complexity of what has often been presented either as a “given” needing no further analysis or as an essentially static problem suitable mainly for psychophysical treatment, and (3) describe a particular real-time model for temporal learning, the diffusion-generalization model. It describes a phenomena, pigeons adaptation to different kinds of cyclic schedules of reinforcement were originally studied 20 or more years ago with the aid of primitive technology that made anything but aggregate measurements difficult and error-prone. Some sequential data were obtained and they were remarkably orderly, although very hard to explain. Theorizing, which is never easy, was also harder then than it is at present because computers, those lifesavers for the mathematically impaired, were slow and difficult to use-and the behavioristic temper of the times was implacably hostile to modeling of any sort. © 1991, Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Duke Scholars

Author John E. R. Staddon Psychology & Neuroscience