ABSTRACT
In this book, we present a new conceptual framework for the understanding of the learning that occurs in the Pavlovian and operant conditioning paradigms. Many of the experiments whose results we seek to explain are familiar to anyone who has taken a course in basic learning, and even to most students who have had only an introductory course in experimental psychology. We show that many of the best known results from the vast conditioning literature–particularly the quantitative results–can be more readily explained if one starts from the assumption that what happens in the course of conditioning is not the formation of associations but rather the learning of the temporal intervals in the experimental protocol. What animals acquire are not associations, but symbolic knowledge of quantifiable properties of their experience. In the final chapter, we argue that this conclusion has broad implications for cognitive science, for neurobiology, and for all those disciplines concerned with the nature of mind.
