Tony Dickinson | |
---|---|
Born | Anthony Dickinson 17 February 1944 |
Alma mater | University of Manchester |
Known for | Animal learning |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Comparative psychology |
Institutions | |
Website | Official website ![]() |
Anthony J. Dickinson, FRS (born 17 February 1944) [1] is a British psychologist, currently Emeritus Professor of Comparative Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. [2] He is the author of the highly cited monograph Contemporary Animal Learning Theory and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2003 for "internationally recognised contributions to our understanding of learning, memory, motivation and planning". [3]
Dickinson graduated in psychology from the University of Manchester in 1967 [4] and earned a PhD at the University of Sussex in 1971, [4] [5] continuing his academic career there as a postdoctoral assistant to Nicholas Mackintosh. [6] He moved to the Department of Experimental Psychology at Cambridge in 1977, where he lectured in associative learning. [6] He became professor in 1999 and has been emeritus professor and a fellow of Hughes Hall since his retirement in 2011. [1]
Dickinson's research focuses on learning, memory, motivation, and future planning in both humans and other animals, [2] [3] [7] and has influenced "incentive" theories of motivation and addiction. [8] His recent work includes theories of actions and habits, [7] [9] [10] drug addiction, [11] and hedonic pleasure. [12] His most highly cited paper is a 1998 Nature collaboration with Cambridge colleague Nicky Clayton on episodic-like memory in scrub jays. [13] [14] Other notable collaborators include Trevor Robbins and Barry Everitt (on mechanisms of addiction), [11] Bernard Balleine (on motivation and hedonic pleasure), [12] [15] John M. Pearce (with whom Dickinson worked on animal learning at both Sussex and Cambridge), [16] ) and Wolfram Schultz (with whom Dickinson has worked on the neuronal mechanisms of rewards, punishments, and other stimuli). [17]
In 2001, Dickinson was elected the Sir Frederic Bartlett lecturer by the Experimental Psychology Society, an annual award recognizing "distinction in experimental psychology... over an extended period", [18] and delivered the 28th Bartlett Memorial Lecture on "Causal Learning" at Cambridge in July 2000. [19] [20] He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2003. [3]
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: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)Operant conditioning, also called instrumental conditioning, is a learning process where voluntary behaviors are modified by association with the addition of reward or aversive stimuli. The frequency or duration of the behavior may increase through reinforcement or decrease through punishment or extinction.
Pleasure is experience that feels good, that involves the enjoyment of something. It contrasts with pain or suffering, which are forms of feeling bad. It is closely related to value, desire and action: humans and other conscious animals find pleasure enjoyable, positive or worthy of seeking. A great variety of activities may be experienced as pleasurable, like eating, having sex, listening to music or playing games. Pleasure is part of various other mental states such as ecstasy, euphoria and flow. Happiness and well-being are closely related to pleasure but not identical with it. There is no general agreement as to whether pleasure should be understood as a sensation, a quality of experiences, an attitude to experiences or otherwise. Pleasure plays a central role in the family of philosophical theories known as hedonism.
Motivation is an internal state that propels individuals to engage in goal-directed behavior. It is often understood as a force that explains why people or animals initiate, continue, or terminate a certain behavior at a particular time. It is a complex phenomenon and its precise definition is disputed. It contrasts with amotivation, which is a state of apathy or listlessness. Motivation is studied in fields like psychology, motivation science, and philosophy.
Sir Frederic Charles Bartlett FRS was a British psychologist and the first professor of experimental psychology at the University of Cambridge. He was one of the forerunners of cognitive psychology as well as cultural psychology. Bartlett considered most of his own work on cognitive psychology to be a study in social psychology, but he was also interested in anthropology, moral science, philosophy, and sociology. Bartlett proudly referred to himself as "a Cambridge psychologist" because while he was at the University of Cambridge, settling for one type of psychology was not an option.
Edward Chace Tolman was an American psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Through Tolman's theories and works, he founded what is now a branch of psychology known as purposive behaviorism. Tolman also promoted the concept known as latent learning first coined by Blodgett (1929). A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Tolman as the 45th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Motivational salience is a cognitive process and a form of attention that motivates or propels an individual's behavior towards or away from a particular object, perceived event or outcome. Motivational salience regulates the intensity of behaviors that facilitate the attainment of a particular goal, the amount of time and energy that an individual is willing to expend to attain a particular goal, and the amount of risk that an individual is willing to accept while working to attain a particular goal.
Neal Elgar Miller was an American experimental psychologist. Described as an energetic man with a variety of interests, including physics, biology and writing, Miller entered the field of psychology to pursue these. With a background training in the sciences, he was inspired by professors and leading psychologists at the time to work on various areas in behavioral psychology and physiological psychology, specifically, relating visceral responses to behavior.
The reward system is a group of neural structures responsible for incentive salience, associative learning, and positively-valenced emotions, particularly ones involving pleasure as a core component. Reward is the attractive and motivational property of a stimulus that induces appetitive behavior, also known as approach behavior, and consummatory behavior. A rewarding stimulus has been described as "any stimulus, object, event, activity, or situation that has the potential to make us approach and consume it is by definition a reward". In operant conditioning, rewarding stimuli function as positive reinforcers; however, the converse statement also holds true: positive reinforcers are rewarding.
Edward Tory Higgins is the Stanley Schachter Professor of Psychology and Business, and Director of the Motivation Science Center at Columbia University. Higgins' research areas include motivation and cognition, judgment and decision-making, and social cognition. Most of his works focus on priming, self-discrepancy theory, and regulatory focus theory. He is also the author of Beyond Pleasure and Pain: How Motivation Works, and Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing the World for Success and Influence.
Barry John Everitt, is a British neuroscientist and academic. He was Master of Downing College, Cambridge (2003–2013), and Professor of Behavioural Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge (1997–2013). He is now emeritus professor and Director of Research. From 2013 to 2022, he was provost of the Gates Cambridge Trust at Cambridge University.
Trevor William RobbinsCBE FRS FMedSci is a professor of cognitive neuroscience and the former Head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. Robbins interests are in the fields of cognitive neuroscience, behavioural neuroscience and psychopharmacology.
Nicholas John Seymour Mackintosh, was a British experimental psychologist and author, specialising in intelligence, psychometrics and animal learning.
Terrie Edith Moffitt is an American-British clinical psychologist who is best known for her pioneering research on the development of antisocial behavior and for her collaboration with colleague and partner Avshalom Caspi in research on gene-environment interactions in mental disorders.
Cecilia Heyes is a British psychologist who studies the evolution of the human mind. She is a Senior Research Fellow in Theoretical Life Sciences at All Souls College, and a Professor of Psychology at the University of Oxford. She is also a Fellow of the British Academy, and President of the Experimental Psychology Society.
Nicola Susan Clayton PhD, FRS, FSB, FAPS, C is a British psychologist. She is Professor of Comparative Cognition at the University of Cambridge, Scientist in Residence at Rambert Dance Company, co-founder of 'The Captured Thought', a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, where she is Director of Studies in Psychology, and a Fellow of the Royal Society since 2010. Clayton was made Honorary Director of Studies and advisor to the 'China UK Development Centre'(CUDC) in 2018. She has been awarded professorships by Nanjing University, Institute of Technology, China (2018), Beijing University of Language and Culture, China (2019), and Hangzhou Diangi University, China (2019). Clayton was made Director of the Cambridge Centre for the Integration of Science, Technology and Culture (CCISTC) in 2020.
Usha Claire Goswami is a researcher and professor of Cognitive Developmental Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, and the director of the Centre for Neuroscience in Education, Downing Site. She obtained her Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the University of Oxford before becoming a professor of cognitive developmental psychology at the University College London. Goswami's work is primarily in educational neuroscience with major focuses on reading development and developmental dyslexia.
Personality theories of addiction are psychological models that associate personality traits or modes of thinking with an individual's proclivity for developing an addiction. Models of addiction risk that have been proposed in psychology literature include an affect dysregulation model of positive and negative psychological affects, the reinforcement sensitivity theory model of impulsiveness and behavioral inhibition, and an impulsivity model of reward sensitization and impulsiveness.
The male warrior hypothesis (MWH) is an evolutionary psychology hypothesis by Professor Mark van Vugt which argues that human psychology has been shaped by between-group competition and conflict. Specifically, the evolutionary history of coalitional aggression between groups of men may have resulted in sex-specific differences in the way outgroups are perceived, creating ingroup vs. outgroup tendencies that are still observable today.
Cyriel Marie Antoine Pennartz is a Dutch neuroscientist serving as professor and head of the Department of Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He is known for his research on memory, motivation, circadian rhythms, perception and consciousness. Pennartz’ work uses a multidisciplinary combination of techniques to understand the relationships between distributed neural activity and cognition, including in vivo electrophysiology and optical imaging, animal behavior and computational modelling.
Terry Earl Robinson is a biopsychologist and neuroscientist, and the Elliot S. Valenstein Distinguished University Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience at The University of Michigan.
Famous and infamous in equal measure, Sussex in the 1960s, sometimes called 'Oxford-by-the-Sea', was definitely the place to be! Amongst students, my contemporaries included Richard Morris, of Morris maze fame, Lorraine Tyler, Tony Dickinson and Graham Hitch, of Baddeley/Hitch working memory fame