Eric Thrailkill

Eric Thrailkill
Occupation	Psychologist
Employer	University of Vermont
Education	Utah State University (Ph.D., Psychology)

Eric Thrailkill is a psychologist at the University of Vermont, where he holds an appointment as Assistant Professor of Psychological Science. His research addresses learning and behavior, including the contextual control of instrumental actions and habits, Pavlovian and operant conditioning, and mechanisms underlying relapse and drug seeking.

Education

Thrailkill earned a Ph.D. in Psychology from Utah State University, completing the program between 2007 and 2013.

Career

Thrailkill joined the University of Vermont in 2013 as a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Psychology, a position he held until 2017. He then served as a Research Affiliate in the Department of Psychological Science from 2017 to 2018. He subsequently became a Research Assistant Professor of Psychological Science at the University of Vermont from 2018 to 2023, and was promoted to Research Associate Professor from 2023 to 2024. In 2024, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Psychological Science at the University of Vermont.

Research

According to Semantic Scholar, Thrailkill has published 50 papers that have collectively been cited 918 times, yielding an h-index of 16. His work has examined the contextual control of instrumental actions and habits, occasion setting and inhibition in extinction learning, progressive ratio schedules of reinforcement, and the role of stimulus predictability in habitual behavior. Additional studies have addressed the neurobiology of stress-induced reinstatement of cocaine seeking and resurgence of behavior in human relapse paradigms.

Thrailkill has received research funding from the National Institutes of Health, including support for a project on loss aversion and cigarette smoking and a training project on translational methods for assessing behavior change and relapse mechanisms, administered through the University of Vermont & State Agricultural College. Across seven funded projects, this support totals $937,164.

Selected publications

• "Contextual control of instrumental actions and habits" (2014), Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition
• "Occasion setting, inhibition, and the contextual control of extinction in Pavlovian and instrumental (operant) learning" (2016), Behavioural Processes
• "Progressive Ratio Schedules of Reinforcement" (2009), Journal of Experimental Psychology. Animal Behavior Processes
• "Stimulus Control of Actions and Habits: A Role for Reinforcer Predictability and Attention in the Development of Habitual Behavior" (2018), Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition
• "Brief light as a practical aversive stimulus for the albino rat" (2010), Behavioural Brain Research
• "Pituitary Adenylate Cyclase-Activating Peptide in the Bed Nucleus of the Stria Terminalis Mediates Stress-Induced Reinstatement of Cocaine Seeking in Rats" (2018), Neuropsychopharmacology
• "Unexpected food outcomes can return a habit to goal-directed action" (2020), Neurobiology of Learning and Memory
• "Resurgence in Humans: Reducing relapse by increasing generalization between treatment and testing" (2019), Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition
• "Timing with opportunity cost: Concurrent schedules of reinforcement improve peak timing" (2009), Learning & Behavior
• "Contextual control of chained instrumental behaviors" (2016), Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition

External links

• Eric Thrailkill on ORCID