Frederic P Miller

David Premack Frederic P Miller

Publisher Marketing: Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. David Premack (born October 26, 1925) is currently emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He was educated at the University of Minnesota at a propitious time. Logical positivism was in full bloom. The departments of Psychology and Philosophy were closely allied. Herbert Feigl, Wilfred Sellars, and Paul Meehl led the philosophy seminars. Group Dynamics, led by Leon Festinger and Stanley Schacter was at its intellectual peak. Premack started in primate research in 1954 at the Yerkes Primate Biology Laboratory at Orange Park outside Jacksonville, Florida. His first two chimpanzee subjects, Sarah and Gussie, started at the University of Missouri and traveled with him to the University of California, Santa Barbara, and then to the University of Pennsylvania, where he had up to nine chimpanzee subjects. Premack's first publication (1959) was a new theory of reinforcement. It argued that the more probable response in any pair of responses could reinforce the less probable response-- demonstrating that reinforcement is a relative, not an absolute property.