I’ve already
blogged about B.F.Skinner, and –coincidentally – he has just celebrated his 108th
birthday. But it led me to think about how learning theory in general seems to
have drifted slowly out of our undergraduate psychology curricula, out of our
animal and experimental psychology labs, and out of the list of high impact
journals. I don’t mean just ‘behaviourism’, I mean learning theory and all that
embraces - from schedules of reinforcement and behaviour analysis, to
associative learning and cognitive inferential models of conditioning – in both
animals and humans.
In 2010, the BPS
Curriculum for the Graduate Basis for Chartered Membership of the Society
listed ‘learning’ as a topic under Cognitive Psychology (that would have jarred
with Prof. Skinner!), and not under Biological Psychology. Interestingly, 10
years ago it was listed under both cognitive and biological psychology. In my
own institution I know that learning theory has become a relatively minor
aspect of Level 1 and Level 2 teaching. Until 2 years ago, I offered a final
year elective called ‘Applications of Learning Theory’, but despite its
applied, impact-related title the course usually recruited less than 10
students. I usually had to begin the first two lectures by covering the basics
of associative learning. If these students had been taught anything about
learning theory in Years 1 and 2 they had retained none of it. This state of
affairs is quite depressing in an institution that twenty five years ago had
one of the leading animal learning labs in the world, inhabited by researchers
such as Nick Mackintosh, Tony Dickinson, John Pearce, and Bob Boakes, to name
but a few.
I haven’t done
anything like a systematic survey of what different Psychology Departments
teach in their undergraduate courses, but I suspect that learning theory no
longer commands anything more than a couple of basic lectures at Level 1 or
Level 2 in many departments. To be fair, most contemporary Introduction to
Psychology texts usually contain a chapter devoted to learning (e.g. 1,2), but
this is usually descriptive and confined to the difference between instrumental
and classical conditioning, coverage of schedules of reinforcement (if you’re
lucky), and a sizable focus on why learning theory has applied importance.
So why the
apparent decline in the pedagogic importance of learning theory? I suspect the
reasons are multiple. Most obviously, learning theory got overtaken by cognitive
psychology in the 1980s and 1990s. There is an irony to this in the sense that
during the 1980s, the study of associative learning had begun to develop some
of the most innovative inferential methods to study what were effectively
‘cognitive’ aspects of animal learning (3, 4) and had also given rise to influential
computational models of associative learning such as the Rescorla-Wagner and
Pearce-Hall models (5,6). These techniques gave us access to what was actually
being learnt by animals in simple (and sometimes complex) learning tasks, and
began to provide a map of the cognitive mechanisms that underlay associative
learning. This should have provided a solid basis from which animal learning
theory could have developed into more universal models of animal consciousness
and experience – but unfortunately this doesn’t appear to have happened on the
scale that we might have expected. I’m still not sure why this didn’t happen,
because at the time this was my vision for the future of animal learning, and one
I imparted enthusiastically to my students. I think that the study of
associative learning got rather bogged down in struggles over the minutiae of learning
mechanisms, and as a result lost a lot of its charisma and appeal for the
unattached cognitive researcher and the inquisitive undergraduate student. It
certainly lost much of its significance for applied psychologists, which was
one of the attractions of the radical behaviourist approach to animal learning.
A second factor in
the decline of learning theory was almost certainly the decline in the number
of animal labs in psychology departments – brought about in the 1980s and 1990s
primarily by a vocal and active animal lib movement. This was certainly one
factor that persuaded me to move from doing animal learning studies to human
learning studies. I remember getting back into work one Monday morning to find
leaflets pushed through the front door of the Psychology building by animal lib
activists. These leaflets highlighted the cruel research carried out by Dr.
Davey in Psychology who tortured rats by putting paper clips on their tails
(7). At the time this was a standard technique used to generate stress in rats
to investigate the effects of stress on feeding and drinking, but it did lead
me to think hard about whether this research was important and whether there
were other forms of research I should be moving towards. It was campaigns like
this that led many Universities to either centralize their animal experiment
facilities or to abandon them altogether. Either way, it made animal research
more difficult to conduct and certainly more difficult for the interested undergraduate
and postgraduate student to access.
In my own case,
allied to the growing practical difficulties associated with doing animal
learning research was the growing intellectual solitude of sharing a research
topic with an ever decreasing number of researchers. In the 1980s I was researching
performance models of Pavlovian conditioning – basically trying to define the
mechanisms by which Pavlovian associations get translated into behaviour –
particularly in unrestrained animals. Eventually it became clear to me that
only me and maybe two or three other people worldwide shared this passion.
Neither was it going to set the world on fire (a bit like my doctoral research
on the determinants of the fixed-interval post-reinforcement pause in rats!).
To cut a long story short, I decided to abandon animal research and invest my
knowledge of learning theory into more applied areas that held a genuine
interest for the lay person. Perhaps surprisingly it was Hans Eysenck who encouraged me to apply my knowledge of
learning theory to psychopathology. During the 1980s, conditioning theory was
getting a particularly bad press in the clinical psychology literature, and
after chairing an invited keynote by Hans at a BPS London Conference he
insisted I use my knowledge of conditioning to demonstrate that experimental
approaches to psychopathology still had some legs (but only after he’d told me
how brilliant his latest book was). This did lead to a couple of papers in
which I applied my knowledge of inferential animal learning techniques to
conditioning models of anxiety disorders (8,9). But for me, these were the
first steps away from learning theory and into a whole new world of research
which extended beyond one other researcher in Indiana, and some futile attempts
to attach paper clips to the tails of hamsters (have you ever tried doing that?
If not – don’t!)(7).
I was recently
pleasantly surprised to discover that both the
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior and the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis are
still going strong as bastions of behaviour analysis research. Sadly, Animal Learning & Behavior has now
become Learning & Behavior, and Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
B (the comparative half traditionally devoted largely to animal learning)
has been subsumed into a single cognitive psychology QJEP. But I was very
pleasantly surprised to find that when I put ‘Experimental Analysis of
Behaviour Group’ into Google that the group was still alive and kicking (http://eabg.bangor.ac.uk).
This group was the conference hub of UK learning theory during the 1970s and
1980s, affectionately known as ‘E-BAG’ and provided a venue for regular table
football games between graduate students from Bangor, Oxford, Cambridge, Sussex
and Manchester amongst others.
I’ve known for
many years that I still have a book in me called ‘Applications of Learning
Theory’ – but it will never get written, because there is no longer a market
for it. That’s a shame, because learning theory still has a lot to offer. It
offers a good grounding in analytical thinking for undergraduate students, it
provides a range of imaginative inferential techniques for studying animal
cognition, it provides a basic theoretical model for response learning across
many areas of psychology, it provides a philosophy of explanation for
understanding behaviour, and it provides a technology of behaviour change – not
many topics in psychology can claim that range of benefits.
(1) Davey G C L (2008) Complete Psychology. Hodder HE.
(2) Hewstone M, Fincham F D & Foster J
(2005) Psychology. BPS Blackwell.
(3) Rescorla R A (1980) Pavlovian second-order conditioning. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
(4) Dickinson A (1980) Contemporary animal learning theory. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
(5) Rescorla R A & Wagner A R (1972) A
theory of Pavlovian conditioning: Variations in the effectiveness of
reinforcement and nonreinforcement. In A H Black & W F Prokasy (Eds) Classical conditioning II: Current research
and theory. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
(6) Pearce J J & Hall G (980) A model for
Pavlovian learning: Variations in the effectiveness of conditioned but not of
unconditioned stimuli. Psychological
Review, 87, 532-552.
(7) Meadows P, Phillips J H & Davey G C L
(1988) Tail-pinch elicited eating in rats (Rattus
Norvegicus) and hamsters (Mesocricetus
auratus). Physiology & Behavior,
43, 429-433.
(8) Davey G C L (1992) Classical conditioning
and the acquisition of human fears and phobias: Review and synthesis of the
literature. Advances in Behaviour
Research & Therapy, 14, 29-66).
(9) Davey G C L (1989) UCS revaluation and
conditioning models of acquired fears. Behaviour
Research & Therapy, 27, 521-528.
