Ralph Miller Email & Phone Number

My specific area of specialization is elementary information processing in animals, including learning, memory, and decision making. Although our research team in recent years has worked within the framework of Pavlovian conditioning, integration with both the physiological and human cognitive literature is sought at the theoretical level. Recent work has been concerned with distinguishing and characterizing perception, acquisition, storage, retention, retrieval, and response generation in rats, using impediments to performance such as blocking, overshadowing, and CS- and US- preexposure effects to understand the processing of acquired information. We have found that training and testing contexts (i.e., background stimuli) play a central role in modulating acquired behavior. Present research continues to examine these issues, particularly to determine how retrieval processes can explain phenomena that are traditionally attributed to differences in acquisition. Experiments are being conducted to see if the retrieval rule that we have formulated based on a modified form of contingency theory (the Comparator Hypothesis) can explain sufficient behavioral variation to allow simplification of contemporary theories of acquired responding. A second avenue of research is concerned with the role of temporal relationships between events in elementary learning. Our work in this area is summarized in what we call the Temporal Coding Hypothesis. Other studies are examining the various properties of occasion setters (i.e., conditional discriminative stimuli). For instance, we are attempting to determine if occasion setters obey rules analogous to those known to govern Pavlovian excitatory conditioned stimuli. Additional research focuses on similarities and differences in Pavlovian conditioning, contingency judgment, and causal attribution by animals and humans.