Learning, Motivation, and Their Physiological Mechanisms

Neal E. Miller's pioneering work in experimental psychology has earned him worldwide respect. This second in a two-volume collection of his work brings together forty-three of Miller's most important and representative essays on learning, motivation, and their physiological mechanisms. They were selected on the basis of their current relevance and their historical significance at the time they were published. In order to emphasize the main themes, essays on a given topic have been grouped together.Learning, Motivation, and Their Physiological Mechanisms begins when the author first discovered the thrill of designing and executing experiments to get clear-cut answers concerning the behavior of children and of rats. The first study was one of the earliest ones on the behavioral effects of the recently synthesized male hormone, testosterone. The second was one of the earliest studies demonstrating the value of using a variety of behavioral techniques to investigate the motivational effects of a physiological intervention. The next studies investigated the satisfying and rewarding effects of food or water in the stomach versus in the mouth and the thirst-inducing and reducing effects of hyper- and hypotonic solutions, respectively, injected into the brain. The last study describes a technique devised for extending the analysis of the mechanism of hunger to the effects of humoral factors in the blood.The study is completed with an examination of trial-and-error learning that was motivated by direct electrical stimulation of the brain and rewarded by the termination of such stimulation. Other studies show that the stimulation via such electrodes not only elicits eating, but also has the principal motivational characteristics of normal hunger. The conclusion deals with a series of experiments that overthrows strong traditional beliefs by proving that glandular and visceral responses mediated by the autonomic nervous system are subject to instrumental learning, which can be

Part VII: Learning; 22: The Perception of Children: A Genetic Study Employing the Critical Choice Delayed Reaction; 23: A Reply to "Sign-Gestalt or Conditioned Reflex?"; 24: Agitated Behavior of Rats During Experimental Extinction and a Curve of Spontaneous Recovery; 25: Integration of Neurophysiological and Behavioral Research; 26: Conflict Versus Consolidation of Memory Traces to Explain "Retrograde Amnesia" Produced by ECS; 27: A Brief Temporal Gradient of Retrograde Amnesia Independent of Situational Change; 28: Different Temporal Gradients of Retrograde Amnesia Produced by Carbon Dioxide Anesthesia and Electroconvulsive Shock; 29: Secondary Reinforcement in Rats as a Function of Information Value and Reliability of the Stimulus; 30: When Is a Reward Reinforcing? An Experimental Study of the Information Hypothesis; 31: Effect of Strength of Drive Determined by a New Technique for Appetitive Classical Conditioning of Rats; 32: Classically Conditioned Tongue-Licking and Operant Bar Pressing Recorded Simultaneously in the Rat; 33: Evidence for Positive Induction in Discrimination Learning; VIII: Physiological Basis of Motivation; 34: Mental and Behavioral Changes Following Male Hormone Treatment of Adult Castration, Hypogonadism, and Psychic Impotence; 35: Decreased "Hunger" but Increased Food Intake Resulting from Hypothalamic Lesions; 36: Hunger-Reducing Effects of Food by Stomach Fistula versus Food by Mouth Measured by a Consummatory Response; 37: Reward Effects of Food Via Stomach Fistula Compared with Those of Food Via Mouth; 38: Thirst-Reducing Effects of Water by Stomach Fistula vs. Water by Mouth Measured by Both a Consummatory and an Instrumental Response; 39: Learning and Performance Motivated by Direct Stimulation of the Brain; 40: A Technique for Mixing the Blood of Unanesthetized Rats; IX: Motivating Effects of Electrical Stimulation of the Brain; 41: Learning Motivated by Electrical Stimulation of the Brain; 42: Implications for Theories of Reinforcement; 43: Experiments on Motivation: Studies Combining Psychological, Physiological, and Pharmacological Techniques; 44: Rewarding and Punishing Effects from Stimulating the Same Place in the Rat's Brain; 45: Motivational Effects of Brain Stimulation and Drugs; 46: Strength of Electrical Stimulation of Lateral Hypothalamus, Food Deprivation, and Tolerance for Quinine in Food; 47: Obesity from Eating Elicited by Daily Stimulation of Hypothalamus; 48: Lateral Hypothalamus: Learning of Food-Seeking Response Motivated by Electrical Stimulation; X: Chemical Coding of Motivation in the Brain; 49: Chemical Coding of Behavior in the Brain: Stimulating the Same Place in the Brain with Different Chemicals Can Elicit Different Types of Behavior; 50: Sensory Feedback in Time-Response of Drinking Elicited by Carbachol in Preoptic Area of Rat; 51: Saline Preference and Body Fluid Analyses in Rats after Intrahypothalamic Injections of Carbachol; 52: Pharmacological Tests for the Function of Hypothalamic Norepinephrine in Eating Behavior; 53: Unexpected Adrenergic Effect of Chlorpromazine: Eating Elicited by Injection into Rat Hypothalamus; XI: Instrumental Learning of Visceral Responses; 54: Modification of a Visceral Response, Salivation in Thirsty Dogs, by Instrumental Training with Water Reward; 55: Instrumental Learning of Heart Rate Changes in Curarized Rats: Shaping, and Specificity to Discriminative Stimulus; 56: Changes in Heart Rate Instrumentally Learned by Curarized Rats as Avoidance Responses; 57: Long Term Retention of Instrumentally Learned Heart-Rate Changes in the Curarized Rat; 58: Instrumental Learning by Curarized Rats of a Specific Visceral Response, Intestinal or Cardiac; 59: Instrumental Learning of Urine Formation by Rats; Changes in Renal Blood Flow; 60: Instrumental Learning of Vasomotor Responses by Rats: Learning to Respond Differentially in the Two Ears; 61: Instrumental Learning of Systolic Blood Pressure Responses by Curarized Rats: Dissociation of Cardiac and Vascular Changes; 62: Transfer of Instrumentally Learned Heart-Rate Changes from Curarized to Noncurarized State: Implications for a Mediational Hypothesis; 63: Heart-Rate Learning in the Noncurarized State, Transfer to the Curarized State, and Subsequent Retraining in the Noncurarized State; 64: Homeostasis and Reward: T-Maze Learning Induced by Manipulating Antidiuretic Hormone