Q: See title A: "Just one, but it has to really WANT to change"

Usage examples of psychologists.

Discovering just how much creatures with nervous systems of this degree of complexity can remember, and whether they can meet the rigorous criteria laid down by association psychologists as to behaviour to be counted as learning, classical or operant conditioning, becomes a matter of the ingenuity of the experimenter in designing appropriate, biologically relevant tasks.

If I were to persist in treating chicks as Descartes might have wanted me to - and indeed as some schools of behaviourist psychologists would still maintain - as insentient machines, mere logic circuits based on carbon chemistry instead of the more reliable silicon chemistry of the computer, I would soon cease to be able to design sensible experiments or interpret the results that I obtain.

A few years after my PhD, in the mid-1960s, I joined a small group of like-minded physiologists, anatomists and psychologists to establish the first neuroscience society in Britain - perhaps the world: the Brain Research Association.

It will mean discarding many shibboleths, the naive molecular reductionism of the biochemists, the and behaviourism of the psychologists, but we can see the goal clearly.

Quite apart from the sort of memory that neurobiologists, psychologists and even novelists talk about and with which I am concerned, mathematics and physics, chemistry, molecular biology, genetics, immunology and evolutionary biology, not to mention computer science, all use the term.

But in the hands of psychologists, it too aspires towards objectivity.

Finkelstein was subsequently the subject of a study by the psychologists W.

Ebbinghaus and Miller psychologists painstakingly catalogued the capacity, scope and limitations of human memory as studied in the controlled context of the laboratory.

In Britain, psychologists and clinicians so far remain more sceptical.

The truth is that m most cases it is very hard to distinguish between these possibilities, despite the best endeavours of many experimental psychologists over the years.

Here, however, it was soon complemented by an equally arid orthodoxy deriving from a US school of psychologists calling themselves behaviourists.

The model science to which these psychologists aspired was clearly physics rather than biology, a graphic example of the powerful attraction this rather untypical science holds for misguidedly envious non-physicists.

It remains extraordinary, though, that with a brain of only 950,000 neurons - less than a thousandth of those in the human retina - bees can learn colours, textures and smells as well as motor skills, and when set appropriate tasks can show most of the features of conditioning, associative and non-associative learning and relatively long-lasting memory found by mammalian psychologists in organisms with many-fold larger brains.

From this and other types of experiment, it is beyond dispute that, even by the most rigid of the criteria used by mammalian psychologists, Drosophila show not merely habituation and sensitization but classical and operant conditioning based on visual, olfactory and even touch cues.

Once again, this type of behaviour meets all the criteria the mammalian psychologists lay down to count as associative learning.