The Essential of Conditioning and Learning

résumé des bases du conditionnement et de l'apprentissage pour les étudiants, les professionnels

Conditioning and learning are core topics that have shaped how we think about and investigate problems in many areas of psychology and allied disciplines. This app aims to provide a concise, current, and sophisticated summary of the essentials of conditioning and learning for students and professionals in those areas.

Studies of basic conditioning mechanisms have moved heavily into the neurosciences, with numerous investigators studying the neural bases of conditioning and learning. However, one cannot examine the neural mechanisms of learning without being well informed about conditioning and learning procedures and phenomena at the level of behavior. Some graduate students and scientists in the neurosciences have had little or no training in behavioral techniques. Others are only familiar with the small number of behavioral techniques that are pertinent to the experiments they are working on. Such limited knowledge handicaps them from achieving a more comprehensive view of how behavior is related to neural mechanisms. It also limits their investigation to a remarkably small number of learning procedures. This book is intended to address this problem by exposing these scientists to at least the “essentials” of conditioning and learning.

Students (and professionals) in developmental and clinical psychology face similar challenges. These investigators also rely on conditioning and learning procedures, but their knowledge is often limited to specific procedures, without understanding the broader intellectual context for those procedures or contemporary theoretical analyses of those phenomena. Such a limited exposure to the field of conditioning and learning as a whole prevents these investigators from fully exploiting conditioning procedures to advance their areas of inquiry. For example, the “standard” therapy for overcoming pathological fears and phobias involves some form of extinction. Extinction is one of the most exciting areas of contemporary research in conditioning and learning, with numerous new techniques and perspectives discovered in recent years. Yet few of these have made their way into the clinical psychology curriculum.

This book can serve as the primary text for an introductory course on conditioning and learning. It can also serve as a supplemental text for courses in neuroscience, clinical psychology, applied behavior analysis, developmental psychology, and psychopharmacology. Finally, the book can be used to provide the foundations for an advanced course, supplemented with journal articles and other assigned readings. To facilitate that, each chapter ends with a list of suggested readings.