Anthony Dickinson

Anthony J. Dickinson (born 17 February 1944) is a British psychologist, currently Emeritus Professor of Comparative Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of the highly cited monograph Contemporary Animal Learning Theory and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2003 for "internationally recognised contributions to our understanding of learning, memory, motivation and planning".

Academic career

Dickinson graduated in psychology from the University of Manchester in 1967 and earned a PhD at the University of Sussex in 1971, continuing his academic career there as a postdoctoral assistant to Nicholas Mackintosh. He moved to the Department of Experimental Psychology at Cambridge in 1977, where he lectured in associative learning. and has influenced "incentive" theories of motivation and addiction. His recent work includes theories of actions and habits, drug addiction, and hedonic pleasure. His most highly cited paper is a 1998 Nature collaboration with Cambridge colleague Nicky Clayton on episodic-like memory in scrub jays. Other notable collaborators include Trevor Robbins and Barry Everitt (on mechanisms of addiction), John M. Pearce (with whom Dickinson worked on animal learning at both Sussex and Cambridge), and Wolfram Schultz (with whom Dickinson has worked on the neuronal mechanisms of rewards, punishments, and other stimuli).

Honours and awards

In 2001, Dickinson was elected the Sir Frederic Bartlett lecturer by the Experimental Psychology Society, an annual award recognising "distinction in experimental psychology... over an extended period", and delivered the 28th Bartlett Memorial Lecture on "Causal Learning" at Cambridge in July 2000. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2003.

Selected publications

Books

Articles