Timothy Johnston

Johnston’s scientific research has focused on the development and evolution of behavior and he has published more than 20 book chapters and peer-reviewed articles on those topics. His recent theoretical work deals with the contribution of gene activity to the development of behavior and psychological processes. This work has been published in Psychological Review, the leading theoretical journal in psychology, and presented in invited talks to the Center for Development Science at UNC Chapel Hill and the Workshop on Behavior Genetics at Dalhousie University, Canada. He has served as a reviewer for numerous professional journals and as a member of the physiology and ethology grant review panel for the National Science Foundation. In addition to his theoretical research, Johnston also publishes on the history of psychology, particularly the history of animal psychology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

There are 14 included publications by Timothy Johnston :

TitleDateViewsBrief Description
Compensation for substrate elasticity in the kinematics of leaping by infant pigtailed macaques. 1980 1624 The means whereby animals adapt their locomotor behavior to variation in environmental conditions is an important and neglected problem in the area of motor control. To investigate this problem, young (3-month-old) pigtailed macaques (Macaca nemes...
Contrasting approaches to a theory of learning 1981 8289 The general process view of learning, which guided research into learning for the first half of this century, has come under attack in recent years from several quarters. One form of criticism has come from proponents of the so-called biological boun...
Development of visual species identification in ducklings: What is the role of imprinting? 1981 4433 The phenomenon of imprinting (a rapid form of exposure learning) is widely presumed to underlie the formation of normal, species-typical social preferences in precocial birds. To determine whether this is in fact the case, 24-h-old domestic and semi-...
Developmental explanation and the ontogeny of birdsong: Nature/nurture redux 1988 6896 Despite several decades of criticism, dichotomous thinking about behavioral development (the view that the behavioral phenotype can be partitioned into inherited and acquired components) remains widespread and influential. This is particularly true i...
An early manuscript in the history of American comparative psychology: Lewis Henry Morgan’s “Animal Psychology” 2002 3459 Abstract: Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) is best known as the 1st ethnographer of Native American culture, but he also wrote on animal psychology, beginning in 1843, some 50 years before the founding of comparative psychology as a scientific discipli...
Genes, Interactions, and the Development of Behavior 2002 13273 Explaining how genes influence behavior is important to many branches of psychology, including development, behavior genetics, and evolutionary psychology. Presented here is a developmental model linking the immediate consequence of gene activity (tr...
Middle Temporal Cortical Visual Area Visuospatial Function in Galago senegalensis 1979 1675 Bushbabies with lesions restricted to the middle temporal (MT) area and animals with larger extrastriate lesions including area MT were compared with normal control animals on tests of visuospatial localization and discrimination learning. Ablation o...
Neophenogenesis: A developmental theory of phenotypic evolution 1990 3801 An important task for evolutionary biology is to explain how phenotypes change over evolutionary time. Neo-Darwinian theory explains phenotypic change as the outcome of genetic change brought about by natural selection. In the neo-Darwinian account, ...
Paradoxical effects of experience with food size and flavour in golden hamsters (Mesocricetus auratus) 1990 3116 Young hamsters were reared until 35 days of age with access to food pellets of one of three sizes. They were then given a choice between the three sizes of pellets: the familiar size and two unfamiliar sizes, and the rate of energy gain from eating p...
The persistence of dichotomies in the study of behavioral development 1987 6713 The inadequacies of dichotomous views of behavioral development that oppose learned and innate behavior, or genetic and environmental determinants of behavior, have long been recognized. However, they continue to exert a powerful influence on current...
Synthesis and separation in the history of ‘nature’ and ‘nurture.’ 2007 3534 For much of the 20th century scientific psychology treated the relative contributions of nature and nurture to the development of phenotypes as the result of two quite separate sources of influence. One, nature, was linked to biological perspectives,...
Theoretical Considerations in the Adaptation of Animal Communication Systems 1976 2478 Using concepts drawn from semiotic, the general theory of signs, and from the mathematical theory of communication, a theoretical framework is developed within which the problems relating to communication system adaptation may be defined and models o...
Three pioneers of American comparative psychology, 1843-1890: Lewis Henry Morgan, John Bascom, and Joseph LeConte 2003 5535 Abstract: Scientific comparative psychology in America dates from the mid-1890s, but there is a body of earlier literature on the topic, written during a period of theistic debates over Darwinian evolution. The anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan rejected...
Visual Preferences of Imprinted Ducklings Are Altered by the Maternal Call 1981 3949 This study determined whether the visual characteristics of a familiar (imprinted) model or the auditory characteristics of the species maternal call are more important in determining the maternal preferences of visually imprinted ducklings. Domestic...