The Essentials of Conditioning and Learning

Now in its fourth edition, Michael Domjan’s classic textbook offers an introduction to learning and conditioning in a concise and accessible style, including the latest influential research findings and theoretical perspectives.
 
Basic principles of learning and conditioning are relevant to an increasingly broad range of psychologists and neuroscientists. Yet in recent years, these core areas have become less prevalent in psychology and neuroscience curricula. As a result, many researchers today lack the training to understand key concepts that underlie human development and behavior.
 
Moreover, while the field of learning and conditioning is more than a hundred years old, new discoveries continue to be made and new applications of basic research are tackling major clinical problems. Domjan summarizes these developments as well as basic learning and conditioning principles using both human and animal examples. Students and scientists from multiple areas of psychology and neuroscience will value this succinct overview of the processes and mechanisms responsible for conditioning and learning.
 

Michael Domjan, PhD, is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has taught learning to undergraduate and graduate students for four decades. He also served as department chair from 1999 to 2005 and was the founding director of the Imaging Research Center from 2005 to 2008. Dr. Domjan is noted for his functional approach to classical conditioning, which he has pursued in studies of sexual conditioning and taste aversion learning. His research was selected for a MERIT Award by the National Institute of Mental Health. Dr. Domjan is a past president of the Pavlovian Society and also served as president of the Society for Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psychology of the American Psychological Association (APA). In 2014, he received the D. O. Hebb Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award from APA Division 6 (Society for Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psychology). Dr. Domjan also enjoys playing the viola and is the director of the Tertis/Pavlov Project, which consists of a series of minilectures (available on YouTube) that describe how learning is involved in musical experience and performance.