Doug Wallace - Winner of the 2003 APA Publication Award

Douglas G. Wallace, who was a graduate student with Dr. Fountain and completed his Ph.D. in 2000, was awarded the 2003 American Psychological Association award for the most outstanding empirical paper authored by a young investigator in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes.  The award was for the publication of his master's thesis.  The citation and abstract for the paper are provided below. 
 

Wallace, D. G., & Fountain, S. B.  (2002).   What is learned in sequential learning?  An associative model of reward magnitude serial-pattern learningJournal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 28, 43-63.

 

Abstract

A computational model of sequence learning is described that is based on pairwise associations and generalization.  Simulations by the model predicted that rats should learn a long monotonic pattern of food quantities better than a nonmonotonic pattern, as predicted by rule-learning theory, and that they should learn a short nonmonotonic pattern with highly discriminable elements better than one with less discriminable elements, as predicted by interitem association theory.  In two other studies, the model also simulated behavioral "rule generalization," "extrapolation," and associative transfer data motivated by both rule-learning and associative perspectives.  Although these simulations do not rule out the possibility that rats can use rule-induction to learn serial patterns, they show that a simple associative model can account for the classical behavioral studies implicating rule learning in reward magnitude serial-pattern learning. 

 

Congratulations, Doug!

 

Dr. Douglas G. Wallace is now an associate professor of psychology at Northern Illinois University.  View his website here.

 

 


FountainLab

Animal Cognition & Neuroscience

· Department of Psychological Sciences · Kent State University · Kent, OH 44242 ·