Associative learning plays a variety of roles in the study of animal cognition from a core
theoretical component to a null hypothesis against which the contribution of cognitive …

For several decades, although studies of rat physiology and behavior have abounded,
research on rat emotions has been limited in scope to fear, anxiety, and pain. Converging …

Identifying cognitive capacities underlying the human evolutionary transition is challenging,
and many hypotheses exist for what makes humans capable of, for example, producing and …

Affective processes are a key determinant of behaviour: At its simplest, liked stimuli are
approached while disliked stimuli are avoided. Although assessing hedonic responses in …

Adults' causal representations integrate information about predictive relations and the
possibility of effective intervention; if one event reliably predicts another, adults can …

Elucidating the nature, use, and origin of knowledge in animals is one of the major
endeavors of comparative psychology. Two aspects of knowledge used in inferential …

Many experiments have shown that humans and other animals can detect contingency
between events accurately. This learning is used to make predictions and to infer causal …

In this chapter, we highlight an integrative perspective, building on the work of many recent
scientists, which synthesizes current perspectives with the recognition that the behavior …

The prediction-error model of dopamine (DA) signaling has largely been confirmed with
various appetitive Pavlovian conditioning procedures and has been supported in tests of …

In the last 15 years, there has been a flourishing of research into the neural basis of
reinforcement learning, drawing together insights and findings from psychology, computer …