3 - Learning Where Things Are and Where Events Happen

Summary

This chapter centers on the work of Hulls arch critic, Edward Tolman. He was convinced that the Pavlov-inspired approach to the study of learning was far too narrow. Using a variety of mazes, Tolman and his students obtained evidence that their rats could anticipate events - rather just make conditioned responses - and could learn about the spatial properties of environments they were placed in. In the late 1960s various researchers - most with little connection to Tolman - discovered the important role of the context in which an animal was conditioned. In the 1970s experiments by neuroscientists on the function of the hippocampus led to a revival of interest in spatial learning and renewed appreciation of Tolmans suggestion that animals form representations - maps - of their environment.