Herbert S. Terrace is a professor of psychology at Columbia University. He is best known for his experimental work in comparative and animal cognition, particularly on the topics of errorless learning, serial learning, and metacognition, as well as for attempting to train a chimpanzee to use sign language, and for his analysis of the evolution of language.
Early Life and Education
Terrace was born November 29, 1936. He received an undergraduate degree in psychology from Cornell University in 1957 and a PhD from Harvard University in 1961, advised by B. F. Skinner. Among his early influences, Terrace credits Skinner’s approach to operant conditioning as influencing him substantially. However, two other figures (S. S. Stevens and H. M. Jenkins) also shaped his early views (Terrace 2010b), motivating his initial research interest in dissecting the role of psychophysical discriminations in operant behaviors. Work in this domain gradually revealed the limitations of a purely behavioral...
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References
Avdagic, E., Jensen, G., Altschul, D., & Terrace, H. S. (2014). Rapid cognitive flexibility of rhesus macaques performing psychophysical task-switching. Animal Cognition, 17, 619–631.
Brannon, E. M., & Terrace, H. S. (1998). Ordering of the numerosities 1 to 9 by monkeys. Science, 282, 746–749.
Chen, S., Swartz, K. B., & Terrace, H. S. (1997). Knowledge of the ordinal position of list items in rhesus monkeys. Psychological Science, 8, 80–86.
Gibbon, J., Baldock, M. D., Locurto, C., Gold, L., & Terrace, H. S. (1977). Trial and intertrial durations in autoshaping. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 3, 264–284.
Jensen, G., Altschul, D., Danly, E., & Terrace, H. S. (2013). Transfer of a serial representation between two distinct tasks by rhesus macaques. PloS One, 8, e70285.
Jensen, G., Muñoz, F., Alkan, Y., Ferrera, V. P., & Terrace, H. S. (2015). Implicit value updating explains transitive inference performance: The betasort model. PLoS Computational Biology, 11, e1004523.
Kornell, N., Son, L. K., & Terrace, H. S. (2007). Transfer of metacognitive skills and hint seeking in monkeys. Psychological Science, 18, 64–71.
Merritt, D. J., & Terrace, H. S. (2011). Mechanisms of inferential order judgments in humans (Homo sapiens) and rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta). Journal of Comparative Psychology, 125, 227–238.
Metcalfe, J., & Terrace, H. S. (Eds.). (2013). Agency and joint attention. New York: Oxford University Press.
Morgan, G., Kornell, N., Kornblum, T., & Terrace, H. S. (2014). Retrospective and prospective metacognitive judgments in rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). Animal Cognition, 17, 249–257.
Roitblat, H. L., Bever, T. G., & Terrace, H. S. (Eds.). (1984). Animal cognition. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Studdert-Kennedy, M., & Terrace, H. S. (2017). In the beginning. Journal of Language Evolution, 2, 114–125.
Subiaul, F., Romansky, K., Cantlon, J. F., Klein, T., & Terrace, H. S. (2007). Cognitive imitation in 2-year-old children (Homo sapiens): A comparison with rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta). Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 6, 1–27.
Tanner, N., Jensen, G., Ferrera, V. P., & Terrace, H. S. (2017). Inferential learning of serial order of perceptual categories by rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta). Journal of Neuroscience. 37, 6268–6276.
Terrace, H. S. (1964). Wavelength generalization after discrimination learning with and without errors. Science, 144, 78–80.
Terrace, H. S. (1972). By-products of discrimination learning. In G. H. Bower (Ed.), Psychology of learning and motivation: Advances in research and theory (Vol. 5, pp. 195–265). New York: Academic.
Terrace, H. S. (1979). Nim: A chimpanzee who learned sign language. New York: Knopf.
Terrace, H. S. (1984a). Animal cognition. In H. L. Roitblat, T. G. Bever, & H. S. Terrace (Eds.), Animal cognition (pp. 7–28). Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Terrace, H. S. (1984b). Simultaneous chaining: The problem it poses for traditional chaining theory. In M. L. Commons, R. J. Herrnstein, & A. R. Wagner (Eds.), Quantitative analyses of behavior: Discrimination processes (pp. 115–138). Cambridge, MA: Ballinger.
Terrace, H. S. (1985). In the beginning was the “name”. American Psychologist, 40, 1011–1028.
Terrace, H. S. (1987). Chunking by a pigeon in a serial learning task. Nature, 325, 149–151.
Terrace, H. S. (2010a). The comparative psychology of serially organized behavior. Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews, 5, 23–58.
Terrace, H. S. (2010b). Defining the stimulus – A memoir. Behavioural Processes, 83, 139–153.
Terrace, H. S. (2011). Missing links in the evolution of language. In S. Dehaene & Y. Christen (Eds.), Characterizing consciousness: From cognition to clinic (pp. 1–25). Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
Terrace, H. S. (forthcoming). Becoming human: Why two minds are better than one. New York: Columbia University Press.
Terrace, H. S., & Bever, T. G. (1976). What might be learned from studying language in chimpanzees? The importance of symbolizing oneself. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 280, 579–588.
Terrace, H. S., & Metcalfe, J. (Eds.). (2005). The missing link in cognition: Origins of self-reflective consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press.
Terrace, H. S., & Son, L. K. (2009). Comparative metacognition. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 19, 67–74.
Terrace, H. S., Petitto, L. A., Sanders, R. J., & Bever, T. G. (1979). Can an ape create a sentence? Science, 206, 891–902.
Terrace, H. S., Son, L. K., & Brannon, E. M. (2003). Serial expertise of rhesus macaques. Psychological Science, 14, 66–73.
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Jensen, G. (2017). Herbert Terrace. In: Vonk, J., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_927-1
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