| Citation | John Pearce is best known for three original and fundamental contributions to the study of associative learning and conditioning in animals. He proposed a novel theory of attention which turned the conventional assumption that animals learn to attend to good predictors of reward on its head by arguing that they pay attention to stimuli whose consequences are unknown. He developed a configural theory of discrimination learning that successfully challenged the prevailing elemental analysis of discrimination and generalisation. And his studies of spatial learning and navigation have shown that animals rely on local rather than global information to find their way to a goal. In each of these areas, neurobiological evidence has supported his theoretical ideas - and those ideas have significantly advanced our understanding of brain function. |