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Publisher Summary The purpose of this chapter is to define a model of behavior as a set of statements from which truthful predictions of the future behavior of an individual can be derived. All such models rest on the assumption that, given sufficient information on present internal state and external input of the individual, its behavior in a subsequent time interval is more or less predictable. There are, however, two different ways in which the state of the individual can be specified. On one hand, there is the purely behavioral approach, which attempts to define the internal state in terms of currently observed relations between sensory input and behavioral output of the individual. In this approach the individual is regarded as a black box. As regards the hypothalamus, although no general theory of its behavioral function can yet be constructed, it is argued that the apparently conflicting views on “specificity” or “plasticity” of its neuronal networks are bound to converge on further analysis of the facts. |
