The Essentials of Conditioning and Learning

Thoroughly updated and revised, this new edition of a classic text, for courses on the psychology of learning, is more sophisticated, current, and complete than ever, while still retaining the book’s signature emphasis on the “essentials” of conditioning and learning.

Through four previous editions, students and instructors have relied on this book’s clear, concise, and highly accessible overview of the processes and mechanisms responsible for conditioning and learning. Domjan and Delamater summarize major theories of how humans and nonhuman animals learn, along with the classic experiments that support these theories and how they have been applied to address real-world problems.

New in the fifth edition:

• Increased discussion of clinical and translational relevance of research with laboratory animals
• Additional coverage of current associative, ethological, behavioral, and information processing approaches to the study of learning and behavior
• New neuroscience findings to clarify behavioral mechanisms
• A streamlined presentation, clarified explanations, and copious new research
• Greater emphasis on how concepts relate to common human experiences—for example, learning to discriminate between phone apps or wine tasting
• A list of YouTube mini-lecture videos designed to accompany and augment the text
• For instructors: a companion website is available containing PowerPoint slides, multiple-choice questions, reflection questions, key terms and definitions, links to supplemental videos, and a transition guide to the new edition.

Michael Domjan is Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has taught learning for five decades. His book, The Principles of Learning and Behavior (Cengage), is now in its 7th edition. Dr. Domjan is recipient of the D.O. Hebb Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award from the Society for Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psychology, and his research was recently celebrated by a special issue of the journal Learning & Behavior (2022, volume 50, number 3).

Andrew R. Delamater is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he has taught various courses in learning and behavior theory and in the neurobiology of associative learning since 1994. He has served the discipline in a variety of ways: as president of the Pavlovian Society (2016) and the Eastern Psychological Association (2012), as a regular member on NIH study sections, as a member on editorial boards for a variety of journals, and currently as editor for the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning & Cognition.