The book Psychotherapy by Reciprocal Inhibition (1968) is widely acclaimed as the masterwork of Joseph Wolpe, a great pioneer in the development of behavioural therapy, and is considered one of the most influential books in the history of clinical psychology. In this article, a brief biography of Wolpe is followed by a critical review of the book that illustrates his major contributions to the evolution of cognitive–behavioural therapy (CBT) as the most empirically supported model of psychotherapy.

This paper presents a modified reciprocal inhibition model for the temporal dynamics of binocular rivalry. The model is based on neurophysiological mechanisms and is derived from human psychophysical data. A simple reciprocal inhibition oscillator may be described with a set of four coupled differential equations with a neurophysiological interpretation. However, such a circuit does not account for some aspects of the temporal behavior of binocular rivalry, including the effects of contrast change on alternation rate and on the magnitudes of changes in duration of the suppressed and dominant phases. To better account for these phenomena, the equations and their simulation are modified to include three new components: (1) presynaptic inhibition of the reciprocal inhibition by the input, (2) the motor delays that occur when a human observer tracks rivalry and (3) a minimum threshold for each neuron's state variable. The result is a much improved fit to psychophysically-obtained data on the temporal behavior of binocular rivalry. Finally, the model is incorporated into a larger model to suggest how rivalry might occur in a network that usually exhibits binocular fusion.

During active vision, the eyes continually scan the visual environment using saccadic scanning movements. This target article presents an information processing model for the control of these movements, with some close parallels to established physiological processes in the oculomotor system. Two separate pathways are concerned with the spatial and the temporal programming of the movement. In the temporal pathway there is spatially distributed coding and the saccade target is selected from a “salience map.” Both pathways descend through a hierarchy of levels, the lower ones operating automatically. Visual onsets have automatic access to the eye control system via the lower levels. Various centres in each pathway are interconnected via reciprocal inhibition. The model accounts for a number of well-established phenomena in target-elicited saccades: the gap effect, express saccades, the remote distractor effect, and the global effect. High-level control of the pathways in tasks such as visual search and reading is discussed; it operates through spatial selection and search selection, which generally combine in an automated way. The model is examined in relation to data from patients with unilateral neglect.