Ories, And Encourage The Development Of Better Ones.

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ories, and encourage the development of better ones.

Note

Recommended Reading
Church, R.M. (1997). (See References)
Gibbon, J., Church, R.M., & Meck,
W.H. (1984). (See References)
Machado, A. (1997). (See References)
Turing, A.M. (1950). (See References)

1. A d d r e s s c o r r e s p o n d e n c e t o
Russell M. Church, Department ofPsychology, Box 1853, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912; e-mail:
russell_church@brown.edu.

James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology. London: Macmillan.
Killeen, P.R., & Fetterman, J.G. (1988). A behavioral theory of timing. Psychological Review, 95,
274–295.
Koehler, W. (1925). T he mentality of apes . New
York: Harcourt, Brace.

References
Acknowledgments—This article isbased
on a talk at a symposium on Learning:
Association or Computation sponsored
by the Department of Psychology, Center
for Cognitive Science, Cognitive Development Laboratory, and Laboratory for
Language and Cognition at Rutgers University, November 4, 1998. Parts of the article appeared in Brown University’s
Faculty Bulletin, Vol. 11 (November 1998),
pp. 33-35. The research used for thedevelopment of the ideas expressed in this
article was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grant MH44234 to
Brown University.

Haykin, S. (1999). Neural networks: A comprehensive
foundation (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Prentice-Hall.

Church, R.M. (1997). Quantitative models of animal learning and cognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes,23, 379–389.
Church, R.M., & Kirkpatrick, K. (2001). Theories of
conditioning and timing. In R.R. Mowrer &
S.B. Klein (Eds.), Contemporary learning: Theory
and application ( pp. 211–253). Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Gallistel, C.R. (1990). The organization of learning.
Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.
Gibbon, J., Church, R.M., & Meck, W.H. (1984).
Scalar timing in memory. In J. Gibbon& L. Allan (Eds.), Timing and time perception. Annals of
the New York Academy of Science, 423, 52–77.

Machado, A. (1997). Learning the temporal dynamics of behavior. Psychological Review, 104,
241–265.
Pavlov, I.P. (1927). Conditioned reflexes: An investigation of the physiological activity of the cerebral
cortex (B.V. Anrep, Ed. & Trans.). London: Oxford University Press.
Sutton, R.S.,& Barto, A.G. (1998). Reinforcement
learning: An introduction. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Thorndike, E.L. (1898). Animal intelligence: An experimental study of the associative processes
in animals. P sychological Review Monograph
Supplement, 2(4, Whole No. 8), 1–109.
Turing, A.M. (1950). Computing machinery and
intelligence. Mind, 59, 433–460.

and computation; it leaves learning
as anunexamined primitive.

Special Section

The Four Causes of Behavior
ARISTOTLE’S FOUR CAUSES

Peter R. Killeen1
Department of Psychology, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona

Abstract
Comprehension of a phenomenon involves identifying
its origin, structure, substrate,
and function, and representing
these factors in some formal system. Aristotle provided a clear
specification ofthese kinds of
explanation, which he called efficient causes (triggers), formal
causes (models), material causes
(substrates or mechanisms), and
final causes (functions). In this
article, Aristotle’s framework is
applied to conditioning and the
computation-versus-association debate. The critical empirical issue is early versus late

reduction of information to disposition. Automatatheory provides a grammar for models of
conditioning and information
processing in which that constraint can be represented.
Keywords
associations; automata; causality; explanation; models

Judging whether learning is better explained as an associative or
computational process requires
that we clarify the key terms. This
essay provides a framework for
discussing explanation, association,...