ABSTRACT
There is today no shortage of dispute among those working in the fields of learning theory and behaviour modification. New experimental techniques, and new theoretical attacks on old problems mean that any overview is likely to be temporary. Learning theories are based on the assumption that there is some discoverable logic to behaviour, over and above the biological details of species differences. It is sometimes said that the first learning theorists were 'British empiricist' philosophers, who stressed that sense experience, plus subsequent mental operations, determined human thought. The principle of association of ideas by the contiguity of events in time was incorporated into many philosophical systems until the nineteenth century. If there is a single feature common to all learning theories, it is the principle that, when one thing follows another in the experience of an individual animal or person, something happens, so that those two things become in some way more associated than they were before.
