From action patterns to behaviour systems

It's always Nature vs Nurture, isn't it?

You know I’m building up to a great paper from Michael Domjan about the ecological factors of learning.

Domjan, M. (2026). The essential elements of an ecological approach to Pavlovian conditioning. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 108164.

I was going to write about it last week, but then I got excited thinking about ecology. I’d write about it this week, but I realised that I’ve got work to do on behaviour systems first. Yikes. And I’d write about it next week, but I know I won’t even get on to behaviour systems until next time. Always so much to say that I’ve not said yet.

How are we here, that I didn’t realise in three years that I’ve not dedicated an entire post to Timberlake’s behaviour systems approach?! We’ll be getting into behaviour systems before Domjan’s paper, but I thought it worthwhile to stop a minute first and think about where we are.

Madness that I haven’t written about behaviour systems yet.

This is especially relevant because of where the dog training industry is.