Empirical Issues and Theoretical Mechanisms of Pavlovian Conditioning

Abstract

Pavlovian conditioning is a very simple and universal form of learning that has the benefit of a long and rich tradition of experimental work and quantitative theorization. With the development of interdisciplinary efforts, behavioral data and quantitative theories of conditioning have become progressively more important not just for experimental psychologists but also for broader audiences such as neurobiologists, computational neuroscientists and artificial intelligence workers. In order to provide interdisciplinary users with an overview of the state of affairs of theoretically oriented research in this field, this chapter reviews a few key mechanisms that are currently deemed necessary for explaining several critical phenomena of Pavlovian conditioning. The chapter is divided into several sections; each referring to a particular theoretical mechanism and to the type of phenomena that it has been designed to account. The progression of the sections reveals phenomena and mechanisms of increasing complexity, which is an indication of the theoretical sophistication that has been reached in this domain. Since there is not a single theory containing all mechanisms, they are described separately from their originating theories, emphasizing thus the fact that they might be used in almost any theoretical implementation.