ABSTRACT
At the Fifteenth International Congress of Psychology held in Brussels in 1957, 1 presented evidence from primate studies regarding the biological determinants of values. I stated then:
“the empirical relations that determine the value of a piece of currency depend, in part, on the utility of that piece of currency for any individual. The currency used in the primate neurobehavioral experiments reported was a food pellet or peanut. Two interrelated classes of variables have been abstracted by economists to determine utility: demand and expectation; two similar classes (need and probability distribution) can be delineated from the experiments reported here — each of the classes related to a distinct neural mechanism. A still different neural mechanism has been delineated whereby (preferences among) values can be discriminated.” (Pribram, 1957, p. 82)
What follows here is an updated version of these findings and analyses, which provide the prologue to and organizational framework for the Proceedings of the Fifth Appalachian Conference on Behavioral Neurodynamics.
