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When we experimental psychologists started calling ourselves ‘neuroscientists’, the convention arose of making a distinction between ‘cognitive’ and ‘behavioural’ neuroscience. The former uses the psychological methods and theories that form the basis of the bulk of the work published in this journal, supplemented, usually, by some version of a brain imaging procedure. The latter usually uses nonhuman animals as the subjects, methods and theories derived from the conditioning laboratory, and investigates the brain using a range of procedures from simple discrete lesions to the most exotic of fibre-tracing techniques. However absurd the terminology – How can we assess human cognition without seeing how the subject behaves? Is not the behaviour of the rat determined by cognitive processes? – the distinction was widely understood. With this background in mind, the potential reader of this book should be warned (or reassured) that, in spite of the title, its content is firmly within the area of behavioural neuroscience. In a well-argued and persuasive opening chapter, the editors make the case for this approach and justify their concentration on processes of associative learning as constituting an explanatory scheme of general applicability. Of the 21 chapters that follow, all but a few are concerned centrally with data and theories derived from experiments with laboratory animals – and this is true even for those in the final section entitled, grandly, ‘Associative perspectives on the human condition’. (The other two main sections are ‘Associative learning’ and ‘Associative representations: Memory, recognition, and perception’.) This work is presented as a ‘handbook’. The time when this term meant a concise and useful (indeed ‘handy’) volume has gone, and at 600-plus pages, this is not a book to slip in your pocket. What we now hope of a handbook is that it will give a thorough and unbiased review of all the major facts and issues pertinent to a given topic. The task of the editors is thus to identify those areas of study that are central to the behavioural neuroscience of associative learning and to choose experts who will write about them appropriately. They have succeeded pretty well in both tasks. They have commissioned chapters on the basic mechanisms of associative learning (excitatory and inhibitory condition, higher-order conditioning, attentional learning), on the extension of associative theory to instances of leaning and cognition found beyond the condition laboratory (e.g., recognition memory, spatial learning, perceptual learning, timing processes) and on the relevance of these notions to ‘the human condition’ (which is taken to encompass almost any other application of associative theory, from anxiety and avoidance, to the origin of mirror neurons, to the analysis of lexical development). When it comes to choosing contributors, the risk is that the chosen authors will leap on their own hobby horses and provide (yet another?) summary of their own recent research with only scant regard for the work of others. For the most part, this problem has been avoided, with authors usually providing useful summaries of their own work, but embedding these in a bigger picture, thus providing a review that will be of use to an interested outsider to the topic. To pick out a few instances, Nasser and Delamater give as concise and helpful an account of the basics of Pavlovian learning as you could hope for. Bonardi et al. clearly have a preference for one theory over another but are even-handed in their description of the application of conditioning theories to timing (the same applies to McGregor’s account of associative and other approaches to spatial learning). And although Gillan et al. entitle their chapter ‘An associative account of avoidance’, they preface this account with a full and fair presentation of a wide range of theorizing on the topic. Readers with a narrow view of the nature ‘neuroscience’ should know that in most chapters the focus is on the psychological and behavioural analysis of the mechanisms involved in a given form of cognition. How these mechanisms are instantiated in cerebral systems and physiological and biochemical processes then follows. This seems to me just how it should be – it is by way of this sort of interaction that our science will progress. I must confess, however, to coming away with a slight feeling of disappointment at the slow rate of progress. Thus after reading the first six chapters, which present sophisticated theoretical analyses of mechanisms of associative learning based on clever experimental designs, we come to Chapter 7 on ‘The epigenetics of neural learning’. This is a comprehensive Book review 10.1080_17470218.2017.1341942QJP0010.1080/17470218.2017.1341942The Quarterly Journal of Experimental PsychologyBook review book-review2017