Allan R. Wagner

Allan R. Wagner (6 January 1934 – 28 September 2018) was an American experimental psychologist and learning theorist, whose work focused upon the basic determinants of associative learning and habituation.

Wagner received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1959, under Kenneth W. Spence, and he was on the faculty of Yale University until his death, serving as Chair of the Department of Psychology from 1983 to 1989, Chair of the Department of Philosophy from 1991 to 1993, Director of the Division of the Social Sciences from 1992 to 1998, and in his last years the James Rowland Angell Professor Emeritus of Psychology.

His research involved extensive study of the conditioned eyeblink response of the rabbit, of which he was one of the initial investigators (1964).

He co-authored the influential Rescorla–Wagner model of Pavlovian conditioning (1972) as well as the Standard Operating Procedures or "Sometimes Opponent Process" (SOP) theory of associative learning (1981), the Affective Extension of SOP (Aesop, 1989) and the Replaced Elements Model (REM) of configural representation (2001, 2008).

Wagner's scientific contributions were recognized by his receipt of the Howard Crosby Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists (1991), the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association (1999), the W. Horsley Gantt Medal of the Pavlovian Society (2009), the William James Lifetime Achievement Award of the Association for Psychological Science (2013), and election to membership in the National Academy of Sciences (1999).