Citation | Anthony Dickinson has made internationally recognised contributions to the study of associative learning, human causal judgements, goal-directed action and episodic memory. Modern accounts of associative learning are based around the central role of prediction errors. Such errors may have a direct effect on the learning process or, as Dickinson was the first to observe, may indirectly modulate the way in which we learn new things. His work on human causal judgements established a hitherto unsuspected dependence on associative learning phenomena, whilst that on goal-directed action, which he has cogently argued to be a fundamental marker of cognition, is characterised by innovative behavioural paradigms that are now in widespread use by others. His findings have led to a new theory of incentive learning and to important clinical insight into the circumstances that lead to compulsive drug-seeking. A new chapter in comparative psychology has also opened through his observations on mental time travel in animals; he and his colleagues have presented the first clear evidence that animals can form episodic-like memory representations. He has won several awards for his research and, through his monograph, made a lasting contribution to the teaching of his discipline. |