ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we summarize the history of behaviourism and discuss some critical developments that have shaped the way we currently think about behaviour. We then discuss phenomena that led researchers in the behaviourist tradition to conclude that non-human animals represent the consequences of their behaviour, can associate absent events which are associatively evoked by other stimuli, and learn about associatively activated representations. We conclude this section by asserting that these demonstrations are consistent with some principles of the “cognitive revolution”. In the last section, we describe examples of how basic work in the behaviourist tradition has paved the way for investigation into the neural basis of acquired behaviour, fostered new developments in pre-clinical research and comparative cognition. We conclude that behaviourism is alive and thriving, and underscore the relevance of understanding innate and acquired behaviour to shed light on issues relevant to basic and applied research.
