BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS AND BIOLOGICAL FACTORS

Abstract

Contemporary interest in in learning may be traced to the seminal work of Breland and Breland (1961) and of John Garcia and his colleagues (e.g., Garcia & Ervin, 1968). Early interest in this area focused on examples of animal learning that were not expected on the basis of prevailing theories of learning, and efforts to systematize the research took several forms. Some attempted to characterize the work as involving or boundaries on learning (Hinde & Stevenson-Hinde, 1973; Seligman & Hager, 1972; Shettleworth, 1972), but this approach was not productive because a sensible way to distinguish between and nonbiological constraints on learning was not available. Others attempted to systematize the work in terms of a continuum of preparedness for learning (Seligman, 1970), but that effort did not lead to further insights because the concept of preparedness was not tied to behavioral processes (Schwartz, 1974). Efforts to characterize the special learning phenomena in terms of adaptive specializations of learning (Domjan & Galef, 1983; Rozin & Kalat, 1971) seemed a bit more promising, but empirical difficulties involved in demonstrating the existence of an adaptive specialization have hampered research along those lines. Conceptual difficulties appear not to have discouraged interest in biological factors or biological constraints on learning, as evidenced by the two recent volumes on the subject that are the topic of this review. Each of these volumes is a collection of articles. Presumably the rationale for bringing a series of articles together is to highlight an emergent concept or idea that is not as obvious when the articles are considered individually. Given that the titles of the volumes refer to biological factors and biological constraints on learning, one might expect that at least a working definition of biological factors or constraints would emerge from each collection of articles. If the editors had such a working definition in mind, I could not discern it from the selection of articles. I hasten to add that many of the individual articles were excellent pieces of work. However, I did not find a clear conception of the topic at hand in either volume. The editors of the special issue of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior (EAB) defined affecting behavior as factors involving the relationship between phylogeny . . . and how that interacts with ontogeny (p. 359). They went on to note that often these phylogenetic factors are expressed as boundary conditions (p. 359) or constraints on some aspect of learning. This is an elegant definition, but it does not help 306 BOOK REVIEWS