Cognition in animals: Learning as program assembly

The dynamics of behavior: Review of Sutton and Barto: Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (2nd ed.)

“…But the pigeons in this experiment were very well trained, so neither the pigeon nor the model in this example are really learning . The pigeon has already learned, not a response or even a time interval, but a program (Staddon, ), a rule it follows interval‐by‐interval. This habit (an older, and in some ways better, word for “operant”) is quite stable, as the bird's vulnerability to the autocatalytic schedule shows.…”