Originally published in 1991, this title was the result of a symposium held at Harvard University. It presents some of the exciting interdisciplinary developments of the time that clarify how animals and people learn to behave adaptively in a rapidly changing environment. The contributors focus on aspects of how recognition learning, reinforcement learning, and motor learning interact to generate adaptive goal-oriented behaviours that can satisfy internal needs – an area of inquiry as important for understanding brain function as it is for designing new types of freely moving autonomous robots.

Since the authors agree that a dynamic analysis of system interactions is needed to understand these challenging phenomena – and neural network models provide a natural framework for representing and analysing such interactions – all the articles either develop neural network models or provide biological constraints for guiding and testing their design.