Guggenheim Fellowship for Social Sciences (1984) National Academy of Sciences (1985) Distinguished Scientific Contribution award of the American Psychological Association (1986) Howard Crosby Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists (1991) Ira Abrams Distinguished Teaching Award of the School of Arts and Sciences (1999) Horsley Grantt Award of the Pavlovian Society (2005) Honorary Doctoral Degree Ghent University (2006) Robert A. Rescorla (May 9, 1940 - March 24, 2020)[1][2] was an American psychologist who specialized in the involvement of cognitive processes in classical conditioning[3] focusing on animal learning and behavior.
[4] One of Rescorla's significant contributions to psychology, with co-creator Allan Wagner, was the Rescorla-Wagner Model of conditioning.
[4] Due to his achievements, Rescorla received the American Psychological Association Awards of the Distinguished Scientific Contributions in 1986.
[5] While at Yale, Rescorla began a fruitful collaboration with colleague Allan Wagner, which led to the development of the Rescorla–Wagner model.
He served as the chair of the psychology department at Penn,[5] as well as the director of undergraduate studies and the dean of the college of arts and sciences.
[8] In 1972, Robert A. Rescorla and his colleague Allan R. Wagner at Yale University, published the Rescorla–Wagner model of associative learning.
The change in the association between a CS and an US that occurs when the two are paired depends on how strongly the US is predicted on that trial – that is, informally, how "surprised" the subject is by the US.
To research these questions, Rescorla and his team used an assortment of methods, including for example fear conditioning, reward training and autoshaping.