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 made quite specific.
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