In his 1948 address to the Division of Theoretical-Experimental Psychology of the American Psychological Association, Kenneth
W. Spence discussed six distinctions between cognitive and stimulus-response (S-R) theories of learning. In this article,
I first review these six distinctions and then focus on two of them in the context of my own research. This research concerns
the specification of stimulus-stimulus associations in associative learning and the characterization of the neural systems
underlying those associations. In the course of describing Spence’s views and my research, I hope to communicate some of the
richness of Spence’s S-R psychology and its currency within modern scientific analyses of behavior.
In this article, I have borrowed heavily from Spence’s (1950) original language but have provided marked quotations only for
particularly lengthy or salient passages. Preparation of the manuscript was supported in part by NIH Grants MH53667 and MH65879.
I thank the organizers of the September 2007 Iowa SpenceFest, Edward Wasserman, John Freeman, and, especially, Allan Wagner,
whose excellent tutelage in the early 1970s endured long enough for me to recall these classic studies so many years later.