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A theoretical account in which inappropriate assignment of significance to events contributes to psychotic experience and its interpretation. It links valuation, learning and belief formation without making them identical.

The age at which learning of a language begins, distinguished from current proficiency and duration of use. Delayed access to any first language can affect later language processing and is not equivalent to deafness.

A pathological impairment of human memory. Specify the affected time period, task and process rather than assuming loss of all forms of learning or all prior knowledge.

A collection of nuclei involved in learning, valuation and defensive regulation among other functions. Different nuclei and projections can have different or opposing effects; the anatomical name is not a unitary fear centre.

Reduced interest or pleasure. Anticipation, experienced pleasure, learning from outcomes and willingness to exert effort are distinguishable components, so one reward task does not measure them all.

Anne G. E. Collins studies learning, decision making and executive function using behavioural experiments and computational models. With Robert C. Wilson, she coauthored a 2019 methods paper explaining how to build, simulate, fit and test models of behavior.^[ref]

An illustrative reinforcement learning rule updates a prediction $Q$ after outcome $r$ by $Q_{\mathrm{new}}=Q+\alpha (r-Q)$, where $\alpha$ is a learning rate. Starting at $Q=0.5$ with $r=1$, $\alpha =0.2$ gives $Q_{\mathrm{new}}=0.6$, whereas $\alpha =0.8$ gives $0.9$. This arithmetic shows what a model parameter does; it does not establish that an experimental participant uses that exact rule.

The joint paper emphasizes testing models through computer simulation and parameter recovery, so a fitted parameter is interpreted in light of what the task can actually identify.^[ref]

Institutional research profile: vcresearch.berkeley.edu/faculty/anne-collins .

Anthony Dickinson studies associative learning and animal cognition. His work includes experiments on retrospective revaluation, in which later information changes judgments about an earlier cause, and the scrub jay cache-recovery study with Nicky Clayton. The former asks how associations alter causal judgments; the latter tests what, where and when information in a nonverbal task. ^[ref][ref]

Learning the meanings, relations and procedures used in arithmetic. A correct answer can arise through different strategies, so assessment should combine outcomes with informative observations of the process.

An experimentally defined writing system with unfamiliar symbols and controlled mappings. It permits manipulation of learning history while requiring separate tests of generalisation to natural reading.^[ref]

Participants learn controlled written forms, pronunciations and sometimes meanings, followed by trained-item and transfer tests. Manipulating frequency and consistency can test sensitivity to input structure without uniquely identifying a learning algorithm.^[ref]

Learning relations among events, actions or outcomes. Classical conditioning and instrumental conditioning provide complementary preparations for testing what information was acquired and how it controls responding.

An action reducing contact with an anticipated aversive situation or experience. It can provide immediate relief while limiting corrective learning, but avoidance of genuine danger is not thereby pathological.

Learning actions that prevent or escape an anticipated aversive outcome. In anxiety, immediate relief and the absence of disconfirming experience can maintain avoidance even when the feared prediction is inaccurate.

An evolutionary role for acquired adjustments, including learning, in allowing persistence and changing the natural selection experienced by inherited variants. It does not require direct inheritance of learned contents.

Interconnected subcortical nuclei participating in circuits with cortical and thalamic systems. Contributions to action, learning and motivation should be distinguished rather than described as one general movement or reward center.

Amygdala nuclei with major sensory, cortical and other inputs and outputs, involved in learning about biologically significant events.

In psychology, behavior is what an organism does, described through actions or responses in a specified setting. A keypress, a spoken answer and a shift of gaze can all be measured, but they provide different evidence about the processes producing them. An operational definition states what will count as the response in a particular investigation.

For an original example, a learning task might measure how often a participant chooses a rewarded symbol and how long each choice takes. Choice frequency and reaction time are distinct outcomes: two participants can make equally accurate choices while taking different amounts of time. Neither measure alone establishes whether a difference arises from attention, comprehension, motivation or motor demands. The interpretation requires a model and suitable comparison conditions.

This distinction is central to construct validity: recording a response reliably does not by itself show that it measures the intended psychological construct. A report of an emotion is also a response to a question, rather than an unmediated measurement of every component of the emotion.

A planned test of a specific prediction relevant to a psychological difficulty. The design specifies what would be expected under competing interpretations and reviews the observed outcome, including alternative explanations; it is not simply repeating a feared activity without a learning question.

Reduction in responding from one session to another. Comparisons should account for changes in task difficulty and context rather than interpreting lower distress during an easier task as equivalent learning.

Reduced learning about an added cue when another cue already predicts the outcome. Control conditions must match exposure and outcome history; blocking in learning is distinct from blocking in experimental design.