Tony Dickinson
Anthony J. Dickinson is a British psychologist, currently Emeritus Professor of Comparative Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of the highly cited monograph Contemporary Animal Learning Theory and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2003 for "internationally recognised contributions to our understanding of learning, memory, motivation and planning".
Academic career
Dickinson graduated in psychology from the University of Manchester in 1967 and earned a PhD at the University of Sussex in 1971, continuing his academic career there as a postdoctoral assistant to Nicholas Mackintosh. He moved to the Department of Experimental Psychology at Cambridge in 1977, where he lectured in associative learning. He became professor in 1999 and has been emeritus professor and a fellow of Hughes Hall since his retirement in 2011.Research
Dickinson's research focuses on learning, memory, motivation, and future planning in both humans and other animals, and has influenced "incentive" theories of motivation and addiction.His recent work includes theories of actions and habits, drug addiction, and hedonic pleasure. His most highly cited paper is a 1998 Nature collaboration with Cambridge colleague Nicky Clayton on episodic-like memory in scrub jays. Other notable collaborators include Trevor Robbins and Barry Everitt, Bernard Balleine, John M. Pearce, and Wolfram Schultz.