From Elementary Associations to Animal Cognition: Connectionist Models of Discrimination Learning

I began work in A1 Riley's laboratory in the fall of 1970. At that time, discrimination learning was a theoretically central area in psychology, and Riley and his students were working on problems of discrimination and generalization in animals. Discrimination Learning had recently been published (Riley, 1968). Wagner, Logan, Haberlandt, and Price (1968), for example, had laid some empirical groundwork for the influential theory of Rescorla and Wagner (1972). And, the two-process theory of Sutherland and Mackintosh (1971) was imminent.