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Title: Learning and Complex Behavior by John W. Donahoe, David C. Palmer ISBN: 0-205-13996-5 Publisher: Prentice Hall Pub. Date: 08 October, 1993 Format: Hardcover List Price(USD): $96.00

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: What psychology is all about.
Comment: Donahoe and Palmer's book represents the Holy Grail of psychology, a rigorous and empirically sound explanation of how human behavior is shaped by experience and the actual neural processes that translate and shape that experience. Integrating the separate methodologies of operant and classical conditioning (behaviorism), cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and neuropsychology, D&P have created a synthetic explanation of how human behavior derives from the complex interplay of informative (i.e., environmental) and neuro-biological events. This bio-behavioral approach is behavioristic because it focuses on how information (or environmental contingencies) may be mapped to behavior, but it notably expands behavioristic doctrine by demonstrating that overt behavior is but one aspect of a bio-behavioral system that includes not just overt but covert (neural) behavior.

D&P's signal accomplishment is their unified principle of reinforcement. Common sense, as well as traditional behavioristic doctrine tells us that behavior occurs because it is either metaphorically pulled from (as in a conditioned reflex like salivation)or is 'glued' to us (as when we receive a monetary reward for a job well done). Similarly, humanistic and social psychology demarcate motivational processes into intrinsic and extrinsic components that are also ultimately derived from the premise that behavior is governed by two response systems. D&P demolish this well established conception, and demonstrate that all learning derives from unitary reinforcement processes that employ near identical neo-cortical and midbrain structures. Reinforcement according to D&P occus when the environmental control of behavior changes, or in other words, when we perceive some discrepancy in our behavior that demands a shifting of attention. On the neural level, this discrepancy is marked by the release of the neuromodulator dopamine that increases synaptic or neural efficacy. D&P's discrepancy model of reinforcement depicts reinforcement as a change in an environmental-behavior relationship that may or may not engage overt behavior. In other words, reinforcement occurs virtually when changes in environmental-behavior relationships are modeled in the brain. Put most simply, we are reinforced when we consider behavioral discrepancies that represent in turn the changing possibilities of existence. In a poetic sense, maxmimized reinforcement occurs when we maximize our hopes and dreams. If happiness is presumed to be maximizing the reinforcers in our lives, and if reinforcers are virtual, not real, then the role model for the happy life is not a bored Charles Foster Kane in his art filled Gothic mausoleum, but a penniless Shakespeare in Love. In an intellectual world increasingly challenged by the intellectual trendiness of selfish genes and conspicuous conception, it is refreshing that the implications of empirical psychology need not always be banal.

But do D&B reach this rather evident conclusion? Unfortunately, they derive no practical or philosophical conclusions whatsoever from their thesis. Despite the revolutionary implications of D&P's analysis, their perspective stays rooted in just the facts. The book is dryly academic in tone(understandable, for this is a textbook), and in spite of a liberal inclusion of 'Far Side' cartoons, it is not an easy book to read. The biggest problem however is their neglect of the 'qualia' or subjective aspects of experience. Reading 'Learning and Complex Behavior' is like reading a medical text explaining in great detail the processes that underlie human biology, but neglecting to say that biological processes often feel good or bad. That is, we can explain a head cold through an analysis of cellular fuctions, but a head cold only becomes meaningful to people because it hurts. In particular, D&P's anchoring of reinforcement processes to the activity of dopaminergic midbrain systems does not include even a cursory mention of the fact that the relative presence of the neuromodulator dopamine is associated with hedonic feelings ranging from elation to depression. Because D&P do not address the obvious fact that reinforcement is inherently hedonic, their analysis does not have the immediate applicability to theoretical concepts (e.g. intrinsic motivation, peak experience, play) in social and humanistic psychology that are based on the subjective interpretations of people. Related to this neglect of the importance of subjective qualia is D&P's complete neglect of emotion, or how somatic events nonconsciously inform behavior. Ironically, contemporary interpretations of emotion (see Antonio Damasio excellent book 'Descartes Error, Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain') follow very much in line with D&P's own analysis, which makes it even more inexplicable why D&P do not mention them in their book.

Overall, 'Learning and Complex Behavior' is an empirical foray par excellence into the mysteries of learning and motivation, but obscures its philosophical implications in the muted tones of academic science. Donahoe and Palmer are refreshingly more interested in scientific rigor and in the integrity of their findings than in mounting a soap box, and do not seem as eager to pull behavioristic psychology out of the laboratory into the world of cultural affairs as their intellectual predecessor B. F. Skinner did. But perhaps the future will see a new B. F. Skinner who take the important implications of Donahoe and Palmer's work into the light of day.