The constructivist perspective has shed new light on the conception of psychopathology and the practice of psychotherapy, surmounting the shortcomings of behaviorism and rationalist cognitive thought, by abandoning the empiricist principle of associationism. In this field, Vittorio Guidano introduced the Cognitive Post-Rationalist model, influenced by attachment theory, evolutionary epistemolog...

One approach to the mind has been to avoid its mysteries by simply defining the mental in terms of the behavioral. This approach has been popular among thinkers who fear that acknowledging mental states that do not reduce to behavior would make psychology unscientific, because unreduced mental states are not intersubjectively accessible in the manner of the entities of the hard sciences. "Behav...

The use of animals in medical research became firmly established in 1865, with the publication of An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine by Claude Bernard. This scientific discourse laid the groundwork for the study of comparative physiology between animals and humans. Half a century later, the animal model was introduced into the behavioral sciences by early theorists Pavlov (cl...

Constructivism learning theory is the further development as behaviorism arrives at cognitivism. According to its teaching theory: knowledge is uncertain; the learning process of knowledge is also the construction process of knowledge; students are the main body of learning activity and they construct knowledge on their own initiatives; teachers are the helpers and the drivers for students cons...

Autonomic computing (AC) is an intelligent computing approach that autonomously carries out robotic and interactive applications based on goaland inference-driven mechanisms. This chapter attempts to explore the theoretical foundations and technical paradigms of AC. It reviews the historical development that leads to the transition from imperative computing to AC. It surveys transdisciplinary t...

Previous chapters have defined Cognitive Load Theory (CLT), described evidence for different origins and types of cognitive load, the way that load interacts with individual differences and the impact of load on learning from instruction. In this chapter we will step back a bit and describe some of the history of cognitive load theory in order to better understand both its current focus and fut...

In a recent article, Schlinger (2008) marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (1957) by considering its impact on the field of behaviorism and research on verbal behavior. In the present article, we comment on Schlinger’s conclusions regarding the impact of the book and highlight the extensions and alternatives to Skinner’s account proposed by research on sti...