ABSTRACT
For the last dozen years I (and my colleagues and students) have been investigating an assortment of problems in areas germane to the main topic of this book (cognitive processes and information processing in animals). Our initial efforts were shaped in part by two themes. First, we were impressed by how successfully the influential variable-reinforcement theory of Rescorla and Wagner (1972) coped with certain associative learning phenomena (e.g., blocking) that had been explained in more cognitive terms (Kamin, 1969). It appeared that traditional techniques used to study animal learning might leave us without decisive answers to questions about cognitive processes in animals (see Riley & Leith, 1976). Second, we were persuaded by Broadbent’s (1961) argument that much could be learned about the nature of cognition and learning in animals by attending to the developing field of information processing in humans. The result was that we were led away from the tools of associative learning and instead adopted steady-state techniques that we saw as more compatible with method and theory favored by researchers of human information processing. We thus hoped to discover and understand the general attentional and memorial capacities of our animal subject in the context of the then-developing field of cognitive psychology.
