Research interests
My research is focused on two areas, learning and addiction. I have been particularly interested in two basic learning processes, classical and operant conditioning.
Classical conditioning is concerned with the way in which organisms learn about the relationships between stimulus events; operant conditioning is concerned with the way in which organisms learn about the relationships between their behaviour and its consequences. Classical conditioning has been taken as a model for the way in which people learn about the causal relationships between environmental events and in recent work I have looked at factors that influence the phenomena of "cue-competition" in causal learning. In standard classical conditioning theory it is assumed that a stimulus trained as a predictor of an outcome can block learning about the relationship between a novel stimulus and the outcome.
However, in human causal learning experiments this often fails to occur and one mediating factor appears to be the spatial relationships that exist between the to-be-blocked target stimulus and the previously trained competitor. Classical conditioning has also been implicated in the development of addiction. Stimuli that are predictive of drug delivery (e.g. the sight and smell of a cigarette) are thought to increase motivation to use drugs and studies using operant (e.g. rate of work in a computer task) and physiological (e.g. skin conductance and heart rate) measures appear to confirm this.
Research project
Exploiting C. elegans to provide insight into neural substrates of human alcohol dependence
Research group
Centre for Vision and Cognition (CVC)
Research project(s)
Dr Steven GlautierBuilding 44 Highfield Campus University of Southampton SO17 1BJ
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