Dr. Edmund Fantino was Distinguished Professor of Psychology and of the Neurosciences Group at the University of California, San Diego. He was an editor of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior and president of the Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior. His research interests were in learning and motivation, especially choice, conditioned reinforcement, self-control, temporal discounting, and sources of multiple stimulus control in humans and pigeons. He was also interested in human reasoning, especially illogical thinking, problem solving, and observing, including the conditions under which information reinforces behavior. He developed an economic distribution game to permit an experimental analysis of altruism. Another major interest was problem solving and the ease with which problem-solving behavior transfers to new situations as a function of the nature of the original learning (rule governed or contingency shaped). He extended this interest in operant analogues to foraging behavior, including assessment of behavioral ecology theories with operant choice technology and optimal choice in humans and pigeons.
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