EVENT: Psychology Colloquium: Prof Peter Lovibond (UNSW)

Psychology Colloquium: Monday 8th August from 5-6pm in the Bayliss MCS G.33, followed by post-talk drinks in the Psychology Courtyard (or in bad weather, the Psychology Common Room, 2nd Floor of Main Psychology building).

Presenter: Peter Lovibond (UNSW)

Peter Lovibond is a Professor of Psychology at the University of New South Wales. His research focuses on human associative learning and its applications to clinical problems. He is particularly interested in the role of cognitive mechanisms such as causal inference and expectancy in learning, anxiety and avoidance. In 1995 he published the DASS, a self-report measure of the negative emotional states of depression, anxiety and stress which is widely used by researchers and clinicians. He is a former member of the Social Behavioural and Economic Sciences panel of the Australian Research Council and a former Head of School of Psychology at UNSW. He is currently Acting Dean of Science at UNSW.

Abstract

Title: Associative learning in humans: Implications for cognitive architecture

A century ago, associative learning was regarded as a fundamental adaptive process that provides the building blocks for higher-order cognition. Today the prevailing view is that humans possess two independent learning systems: an automatic conditioning system preserved across evolution and a cognitive/symbolic system more or less unique to humans. Such an architecture provides the prototype for a wide range of dual-system models across psychology. In this talk I will argue that the dual-system model of learning has limited explanatory power, is unsupported by the data, is computationally implausible and is inconsistent with principles of evolution. I will also present data showing that many of the signature phenomena of associative learning in animals are mediated by deductive and inductive reasoning processes in humans. All of these considerations suggest that associative learning is a difficult, effortful task that is accomplished by a single coordinated cognitive system.