PREFACE

Learning Principles and Applications seeks to provide students with an up to date presentation of the current knowledge in learning. Basic principles are described and supplemented by research studies to provide validation of those principles , and both classic experiments and important contemporary studie3s are in corporate into the text. The fourth edition continues to uphold the same uncompromising scholarship of earlier editions.

Psychologists who study the nature of the learning process have uncovered many important principles about how we acquire information about the structure of our environment and how we use this understanding to interact effectively with our environment. As in earlier editions, the fourth edition provides a thorough up to date coverage of such principles and applications.

Much exciting new research in learning has occurred in the last few years. And I focus attention on these findings throughout the text. Some of the key new discoveries include the conditioning of immune system suppression , the identification of behavioral economic principles in operant conditioning, the deter monition of conditions that lead to a reinforce being devalued the recognition of processes that provide the reinforcing power of psychoactive drugs, the study of the question of whether language learning occurs n primates and the relevance of memory reconstruction to understanding the validity of repressed memories.