The induction of new behavior is a basic question in all areas of psychology.  For example, a fundamental question in the study of development is why one response form gives way to another as the organism gets older.  Babies go from crawling to walking and from suckling to feeding.  Creative problem solving is a topic of study in cognitive psychology.  In education, one is constantly concerned with the teaching of new responses, and successful psychotherapy often requires that clients learn new ways of reacting.  It is clear that when we understand the principles that underlie the generation of new behavior, we will have information that is useful across the range of practical problems that psychologists have addressed.

Our own work on the origins of new behavior has taken place in three domains. We have researched how a rat is shaped to press a bar, how a young bird learns to eat a piece of seed, and how humans learn a novel sequence of simple actions.  Some of our findings indicate that pecking, a behavior that may appear entirely innate to the casual observer, is actually the product of a complex interaction between innate, social, and conditioned processes.

In a current series of projects, we are looking at how the experience of reward or nonreward affects response variability in humans in animals.  Our findings indicate that nonreward induces response variability, and reward inhibits response variability.  In other words, unpleasant outcomes cause us (and other animals) to try new ways of doing things, while pleasant outcomes encourage us to stick with the old. See some of our publications on these topics.

A fundamental aspect of behavior that we study is how behavior comes to be timed. Any skilled action requires that behavior occur in a precise temporal pattern.  When we learn to anticipate an impending event, such as the changing of a traffic light from yellow to red,  we learn a specific temporal expectation.   Animals use the passage of time to determine if they should continue to forage for food or switch to a new search area.  In many ways, timing is a fundamental aspect of the organization of behavior.  In our lab, we have been studying how the temporal distribution of rewards affects behavior in both Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning.   In addition to characterizing the behavioral characteristics we have also begun to explore the neural substrates of timing in collaboration with the labs of Profs. Jon Horvitz and Paul Currie

Specifically, we have been looking at the roles of dopamine and the basal ganglia.  See some of our timing publications.