Cognition in animals: Learning as program assembly (original) (raw)

Learning most tasks has two components. First, an approximate solution must be found: the student laboriously solves the first algebra problem, the rat stumbles on the lever. Second, after an intervening period when the organism does something else, a residue must remain of what occurred on first exposure so that there are savings, i.e., the organism does a bit better the seccmd time than it did the first time. Learning is compounded of these two effects: initial often ill-directed stabs at solving the problem, which will be repeated in reduced form on subsequent exposures, plus the retention from occasion to occasion of an accumulating core of reliable knowledge. The two major areas of animal learning are divided along these general lines. Operant conditioning, to the extent that it is concerned with learning at all, is interested in the initial "shaping" of behavior by the condition: ,f reinforcement. There is much less interest in how the changes wrought in one experimental session carry over to the next. Classical conditioning, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with the accumulation of "strength" by a conditioned stinmlus from one experimental session to the next. Although classical and operant conditioners disagree on many points they agree in one respect: on the importance of stimuli and responses. Both lines ofwork have their theoretical roots in the refle.u-not the reflex of Sherrington a subtle concept subordinate to his main theme of integration, but a simpler idea used as a metaphor for cause. In recent years, dissatisfaction with this primitive kind of theory has led to the appearance of "cognitive" views. These take several forms: updated versions of Tolmanian cognitive maps (e.g., Menzel, 1978), experimental exploration of the perceptual categories of animals (e.g., Herrnstein and de Villiers, 1980), more or 1~s~ explicit informationprocessing accounts (e.g.,Wagner, 1978),through accounts of animal behavior as a rational process paralleiing human verbal reasoning (e.g., Seligman and Johnston, 1973). Any account involving the word "memory" or referrip:-to constructs at all'removed from measurable stimuli and responses tends also to label itself "cognitive" (cf., several chapters in the book edited by Hulse, Fowler and Honig, 1978. *I thank Richard Herrnstein, Stewart Hulse and Evalyn Segal for comments on an earlier version of this piece. Research supported by grants from the National Science Foundation to Duke University. Reprint requests should be sent to J.