Allan Wagner

James Rowland Angell Professor of Psychology

Allan Wagner, BA, M.A., Ph.D. University of Iowa, Yale faculty member since 1959: Across more than five decades, you and your students have taken our understanding of the basic mechanisms of learning and memory from “Stimulus-Response” behaviorism to the cognitive approach to “animal learning” and then to the emerging field of “psychobiology” through what we now call “behavioral neuroscience.”  You offered new perspectives on the way organisms learn to respond to or ignore new stimuli, developed new methods, such as studying classical conditioning by observing how a rabbit learns to blink its eye to initially ineffectual stimuli, prompted a cognitive revolution in animal learning, and then reinserted the ‘heart into the machine’ with the model known as AESOP, which captured the interactions between cognition and emotion in conditioning and learning. Your quantitative model known as the Sometimes Opponent Process (SOP) theory described the fundamental phenomena of classical conditioning, perhaps the most important work since Pavlov’s. You continued in the tradition of your mentor, Spence, and his mentor, Hull, by organizing data into coherent, computational models that still could be understood in non-computational terms. Your elegant experiments and your formal, mathematical theories of behavioral phenomena resulting from collaborations with Logan, Haberlandt, Price, & Rescorla led to seminal papers that invigorated the field of animal learning.
 
Your dedication as editor of the APA’s most important experimental psychology journal—one of your many editorships - describing work in animal behavior changed the focus of this field. Your scholarly contributions have been recognized by many honors and awards, including the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, the Howard Crosby Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and election to the National Academy of Sciences. And your current work as part of the Research Committee of the High Value Interrogation Group is investigating humane approaches to military prisoner interrogation, based in psychological research, that could lead to the abandonment of recent practices that some have regarded as torture. 

Your career as an educator and University leader—like your career in the laboratory—has been rooted in rich tradition but characterized by the willingness to make bold and innovative moves. Introduction to Psychology has for many years now been one of Yale’s most galvanizing undergraduate courses. You ushered in the tradition of teaching excellence in this course, by making it interesting and relevant and by using—among other techniques—vivid and memorable classroom demonstrations. As chair of Psychology for six years, you were known for your thoughtfulness and even-handedness, and the new faculty hired when you were Chair significantly expanded the scope of the Department. Your approach to mentoring early career scholars— providing detailed feedback on Junior Faculty Fellowship proposals and regular conversations about progress in the laboratory and classroom—presaged approaches being introduced FAS-wide today. Because of your experience, wisdom, high standards and fair-mindedness, you were asked to chair the Department of Philosophy at a difficult moment in its history and proposed bold ideas to get that Department back on its feet (as it now is!). As Director of the Division of the Social Sciences you motivated conversations that led to significant improvements in the reputation of several different departments and underscored the importance of high standards fairly applied. Now as you retire, after more than a half-century of fundamental contributions to psychological science and to Yale, the Yale faculty tips its hat to a member of its ranks who has brought both light and truth to our campus and the world.

Tribute Editor: Penelope Laurans