ABSTRACT
The shift from behavioral to more identifiably cognitive theories of learning in the 1960s produced two innocent casualties caught, as it were, in the crossfire of competing general approaches. The first casualty was the systematic study of what animals learn in instrumental conditioning and the second was then-burgeoning interest in the role that primary motivational processes play in learning. Nevertheless, although there has been a lack of general interest in these issues, systematic research efforts in the intervening decades have significantly advanced our understanding of them. These advances are described in this chapter as they emerge from investigations of the role that incentive processes play in instrumental conditioning.
