My main research interests are the basic psychological processes that underlie the adaptive behavior of animals, such as learning, memory, or decision-making. I consider the knowledge of these processes to be essential in the establishment of foundations that will allow a better understanding of more complex phenomena and organisms. In pursuit of those interests, I have looked at how animals learn and adapt to a variety of tasks, such as timing tasks where food is made available after predictable intervals, both in the context of autoshaping and fixed-interval schedules (e.g., Pinto, Fortes, Jozefowiez, & Machado, 2012), or discrimination tasks where access to food is contingent on a correct choice (e.g., Pinto & Machado, 2011, 2015, 2017), with and without retention intervals.

Choice behavior is a valuable source of insight regarding what an animal learns from a given situation, so I am also interested in decision making, both in situations leading up to suboptimal choice (Fortes, Pinto, Machado, & Vasconcelos, 2018), as well as context effects that may affect preferences (Pinto, Fortes, Wilson, & Zentall, 2016). Another aspect of choice I have been interested in are choice biases in discrimination tasks, following delay and no-stimulus tests, in tasks where choices were based on the duration of stimuli or on the number of responses (Pinto & Sousa, 2021; Pinto & Mota, 2022).