Cognitive versus stimulus-response theories of learning.
In his 1948 address to the Division of Theoretical-Experimental Psychology of the American Psychological Association, Kenneth W. Spence discussed six distinctions between cognitive and stimulus-response (S-R) theories of learning. In this article, I first review these six distinctions and then focus on two of them in the context of my own research. This research concerns the specification of stimulus-stimulus associations in associative learning and the characterization of the neural systems underlying those associations. In the course of describing Spence's views and my research, I hope to communicate some of the richness of Spence's S-R psychology and its currency within modern scientific analyses of behavior.
Holland
Peter C
PC
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA. pch@jhu.edu
D000818:Animals; D003071:Cognition; D003214:Conditioning, Classical; D007858:Learning; D011582:Psychological Theory