Conditioning and associative learning.

This is rightly regarded as the last word in lea~=iing theory but, as Mackintosh emphasizes on p. 2, lee/rning theory of this particular kind 'no "anger occupies the exalted position it once held among the various fields of psychology'. The the-o~y applies most directly to rats and pigeons re-,.eiving signal-reinforcer pairings in Skinner boxes (co.,a.(titioned emotional response procedures for rats; autoshaping for pigeons): in the preface Mackintosh notes that he has 'eschewed discussion' of anything directly concerned with schedules of reinforcement , and said little or nothing about naturalistic topics such as imprinting, song learning , navigation or intelligence in animal species. That is because the theoretical aim of the book is to establish certain laws of association which make up "one possible view of the nature of condition-ing'. One cannot do justice to this view briefly, but Mackintosh first adopts a version of two-factor theory, that is he accepts an operational and functional distinction between classical and instrumental conditioning (p. 41); then he advocates a stimulus-substi~r.ution theory of c!assical conditioning , in which a CS elicits responses by activating a representation of a UCS, but only according to its own sensory properties (pp. 68-70); puts forward a '!'oimamai~ ,.h~ory of instrumental conditioning, in which an animal must infer from previous associations between lever pressing and food that it might be a good idea to press the lever again (pp. 110-112); argues for the theoretical symmetry of re~ard and pmfishment (pp. 126-131); just about (I think) accepts the two-iactor tileory of avoidance learning (pp. 155-170); discusses various laws of association in terms of the adequacy or otherwise of the Rescoda-Wagner single-equation model (pp. 171-239); and in a final short chapter sets off the phenomena of discrimination learning as calling upon processes 'not normally studied in simple conditioning experiments' (p. 273) and 'outside the scope of standard theories of condi-tioning' (p. 271). l?y comparison with his enormously ~uccessful The Psychology of Animal Learning, Maekintosh's present book is theoretically tighter and more succinct. The major theoretical change seems to me to be a slight firming up of the classical/instrumental distinction. Within the areas covered, Macldntosh is so encyclopaedically knowledgeable, and au fait with the merits and failings of all conceivable theoretical positions, as to be quite abc~vc criticism. One can only lament, for the purposes of this journal, that the learning theories of the present Cambridge school make so little contact with …