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In the Blaisdell lab here in the Department of Psychology at UCLA, we are interested in comparative animal cognition and behavior. This includes questions like:
How do animals represent their world?
How are these representations built?
How do these representations subserve information processes?
To answer these questions, our research uses Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning procedures to study how laboratory rats and pigeons (and occasionally humans) solve problems involving cause-effect relations, how they encode and use temporal and spatial information to make response decisions, and how they construct more complex representations from simpler ones. These proximate mechanisms of behavior (i.e., information processing and response generation) will shed light on how the ultimate (i.e., evolutionary) function of behavior is served.
Aaron Blaisdell