Editor Spotlight

I received my PhD in experimental psychology from Dalhousie University in 1989 with a specialization in associative learning, and then performed post-doctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania where I studied Pavlovian extinction, contingency degradation effects, and multi-layer connectionist network models of associative learning.

I have been at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York since 1994, served as an associate editor for the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2005–2017), and have edited special issues and special sections for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.

My current interests include studies in the psychological and neurobiological foundations of Pavlovian extinction, interval timing, prediction error coding, goal-directed control, conditional discrimination learning, and connectionist models.

JEP:ALC will continue to showcase studies of the basic mechanisms and processes of associative learning, comparative cognition, and operant behavior.

Empirical and theoretical contributions that advance our understanding in these research domains will be targeted, and the methods employed will include purely behavioral manipulations, neurobiological tools, comparative assessments, and developmental manipulations.

In an effort to broaden the readership, every attempt will be made to encourage cross-disciplinary approaches to the study of learning and behavior, especially as more ties can be drawn between neurobiological, behavioral, and comparative levels of analysis.

In addition to empirical papers and theoretical reviews, brief communications will be considered as highly novel empirical findings, brief theoretical commentaries, or opinion pieces about an exciting new development.

JEP:ALC has always been the journal of choice for investigators' best work in the study of basic learning processes. It presents a deeper understanding of the behavioral mechanisms and basic processes underlying learned behavior than is found elsewhere.

The journal thus plays a leading role in not only disseminating new information but also in informing other related disciplines on how to study the psychological foundations of learned behavior.

This is especially important for neuroscience investigations of behavioral function, comparative assessments of cognition, developmental approaches, and health-related research in which animal models of various psychopathologies are studied.

Currently exciting areas include studies of extinction, action/habit learning, delayed discounting, episodic memory, spatial coding, prediction error coding and "model-free/model-based" learning, attention processes in associative learning, and causal reasoning.

As the field develops a better understanding of the basic mechanisms involved in simple forms of learning, important applications to mental health will follow. For example, basic studies of extinction learning have informed therapeutic strategies for addictions and anxiety disorders.

Moreover, as effective animal models of normal cognitive functioning are developed, applications include studies of aging, dementia, and developmental disabilities.

It is crucial to develop collaborative approaches that study these phenomena at multiple levels of analysis, from brain to behavior to psychiatry.

The most significant challenge facing the discipline today concerns constraints in continued funding of basic behavioral science research.

Historically, funding agencies have generously supported this kind of research, but, increasingly, successful grants require multi-level approaches that often span molecular neurobiology, systems neuroscience, and behavioral levels of analysis, and are often, in some ways, translational. Fewer grants are being funded at the behavioral level alone, and, unfortunately, expertise in basic behavioral processes is often lacking as a result.

This means that the journal should adapt to changing trends in the discipline and reflect a more multi-disciplinary research agenda exploiting obvious ties with related disciplines. However, the main strength of JEP:ALC has always been its focus on a psychology-level analysis, and, in my view, the journal should play a leading role in highlighting its importance.

This will require reaching out to allied disciplines (e.g., neuroscience, animal behavior, developmental, animal models of psychopathology) in novel ways for the journal.

To broaden the readership, I especially wish to attract researchers from these different disciplines to submit their behaviorally-focused work to the journal. In this way, a greater appreciation can be achieved of how a solid behavioral/psychological analysis can inform our understanding at other levels.

Although other journals may have higher impact factors, authors should realize that they will receive high quality evaluations from leading experts in the study of behavior.

Special issues can also help. The first special issue will likely be a collection of papers honoring the career of Allan Wagner, the first editor of this journal who recently passed away and whose empirical and theoretical contributions have been immense.

Other special topics to be explored may include human/non-human studies of attention, reasoning and decision making, neuroscience and behavioral studies of the action/habit distinction, delay discounting from behavioral and neuroeconomic perspectives, and the comparative psychology of memory.

The editorial board that I have assembled covers a broad range of interests across different levels of expertise and I am hopeful that this spectrum of board members will attract a wider audience than the journal has seen in recent years.

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