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Serial List Learning

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Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior

On the week of September 20, 1948, a symposium titled “Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior” was held at the California Institute of Technology. The symposium focused on the question of how the nervous system controls behavior and was attended by a number of eminent scientists, such as John von Neumann, Wolfgang Köhler, Karl Lashley, and Heinrich Klüver. Of the papers presented at the symposium, Lashley’s (1951) paper is likely the most influential and enduring (Bruce 1994). Lashley (1951) focused on the problem of explaining how serially organized behaviors are represented and executed. At the time of his address, the dominant theory postulated that all serially organized behaviors were composed of a chain of stimulus-response (S-R) associations. That is, the functional stimulus for a response (Rn) is the response to the preceding stimulus (Rn-1). Lashley (1951) rejected the chaining theory of serial-organized behavior, especially as an explanation for language, and noted that many errors...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

    Damian Scarf & Michael Colombo

Authors
  1. Damian Scarf
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  2. Michael Colombo
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Correspondence to Damian Scarf .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Oakland University , Rochester, Michigan, USA

    Jennifer Vonk

  2. Department of Psychology, Oakland University Department of Psychology, Rochester, Michigan, USA

    Todd Shackelford

Section Editor information

  1. University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada

    Dawson Clary

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Scarf, D., Colombo, M. (2018). Serial List Learning. In: Vonk, J., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1507-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1507-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-47829-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-47829-6

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