Reinforcement: How We Had It Wrong, And How The Brain And Classical Conditioning Came To The Rescue
6.00 pm (UK Time) - 23rd July 2026 - Webinar and Q&A - Once purchased, you will have a minimum of 12 months access to the recording.
About this Webinar:
For many years, behavioural scientists struggled to explain reinforcement. Drive theory offered some answers, but it also generated considerable confusion because ethologists and psychologists used the term drive in very different ways. Was a drive an innate motivational tendency, as many ethologists understood it? Was it a response to a metabolic deficit? Or was it some hybrid of the two?
None of the behavioural sciences—including the study of motivation and learning—produced an entirely satisfactory answer until researchers in neuroscience, particularly physiological psychology and the neurobiology of learning, began to focus more directly on the underlying mechanisms. This helps explain why certain terms have become so prominent today, although they are often misunderstood: dopamine, incentive motivation, incentive learning, secondary or conditioned reinforcers such as the clicker, and continuous versus intermittent reinforcement.
In this talk, I will examine these concepts and address the growing divide between contemporary academic research and the practices and assumptions of animal trainers. I will draw on neuroscience, psychological theories of learning, and the ethology of persistent behaviours that occur despite being rarely—if ever—reinforced. I will also consider how selected cognitive concepts may help guide us, including the increasingly dominant role of classical conditioning in contemporary explanations of motivation and behaviour.
Meet your Instructor
Simon Gadbois
Simon Gadbois integrates neuroscience and the behavioural sciences in his research on applied canine olfaction. Since 2006, his two principal research programs have focused on wildlife conservation dogs and biomedical detection dogs (PTSD), alongside related projects involving applications such as "archeology dogs".
His interest in olfaction emerged from an earlier background in neuroscience and ethology, particularly his work with wild canids, including red foxes, coyotes, and wolves. His research on the social endocrinology of wolves examined, among other topics, the roles of scent marking (pheromones) in social behaviour.
Learning theory was also central to his early academic research. He worked with both classical and operant conditioning using rodent and avian models, including studies of neuropharmacology in rats and spatial cognition in pigeons.
Because his current work centres on the practical applications of canine olfaction, his interests extend well beyond basic training methods. Questions concerning motivation, the maintenance of motivation, and motivational collapse are therefore central to his engagement with incentive theories of learning and behaviour.
