I am sure that every speaker must tell you, as indeed he certainly feels, that it is a great honour to have the opportunity to present a paper to your Society, which has such a distinguished role both in the history and in the most recent advances of science. I am glad to have this opportunity to speak to you. Upon being asked to talk on this topic, however, I became acutely aware of how active a field experimental psychology is today. Each year
Psychological Abstracts
publishes summaries of approximately 9500 articles presumed to be relevant to some branch of psychology. Of these approximately 1300 are in human experimental psychology and 1400 in comparative and physiological psychology, or a total of something like 2700 in the general area of experimental psychology. I cannot hope to do justice to such an avalanche of material. The best I can do is to give you a few brief samples from certain actively developing areas, but other equally active areas might just as well have been chosen. In order to be impartial, I have excluded my own work on motivational effects of electrical and chemical stimulation of the brain and on conflict behaviour,* which I have had ample opportunity to present in lectures elsewhere in your country.
