While we can talk about broad classes of events normally functioning as appetitive stimuli under certain conditions, the degree to which any particular stimulus will be appetitive is a matter of the specific conditions and propensities of the individual organism. The Premack Principle provides a way out of this dilemma.
Aversive stimuli are those environmental events which, under normal circumstances, an organism would move away from, or avoid. Painful electric shock, being out in the cold, etc., would all be examples of aversive stimuli. A couple of cautions need to be kept in mind here. First, the extent to which a particular environmental event will function as an aversive stimulus is conditional in that it depends to some extent on the organism's past history. For example, while a piece chocolate cake may seem like a good example of an appetitive stimulus for most people, it could be considered aversive for someone who got violently ill after eating some chocolate cake (taste aversion learning). Also, the magnitude of the stimulus is a factor in the degree to which an environmental event will function as an aversive stimulus. Music played at a moderate level may be appetitive, but played at 120 dB is aversive.
While we can talk about broad classes of events normally functioning as aversive stimuli under certain conditions, the degree to which any particular stimulus will be aversive is a matter of the specific conditions and propensities of the individual organism. The Premack Principle provides a way out of this dilemma.
Behavioral Repertoire. Behaviorists like to use the phrase behavioral repertoire when talking about the pool of activities/skills that an individual possesses. For example, they talk about learning as increasing the individual's behavioral repertoire, and a skill that someone lacks as not being part of his behavioral repertoire. This may seem cumbersome, but the reason for it is it is a neutral way of describing skills and deficits, and puts the emphasis on what the individual can do, which is observable (remember behaviorists' penchant for dealing with observables), rather than implying internal states like the term skills does.
Backwards chaining. Although it might seem like you should start training by first training your rat the beginning of the maze, in fact training will be much faster if you train it to find the goal box first, then the first few steps leading to the goal box, and so on, until you have added each component of the maze from the last part of the maze up to the front. The reason is that what the rat is really interested in (to talk in everyday terms) is the food. What we are doing is associating the next-to-last compoent of the maze with food, then when that association is pretty strong, we'll use it as a conditioned reinforcer to train the rat the next-to-the-next-to-the-last componet before it gets food, and so on, gradually lengthening out the chain of behaviors until the whole maze is learned.
Subjective vs. objective. One of the major distinctions that we make in a scientific analysis is between those phenomena which are the private, internal, unobservable, and therefore unmeasurable by others, which are labelled subjective, and those things which are public, external, observable and therefore measurable by others, which are labelled objective. Objective phenomena are therefore accessable to analysis.
Scientific explanations. Behaviorists want to stick to observable (or at least potentially observable) actions and changes in the environment. The key to understanding current behavior lies in the past history of the individual. He does careful work because in the past, when he has done sloppy work, his boss has yelled at him, which he found aversive, making it more probable that he does careful work now. It's a small change, but we are no longer looking to the future, or at internal states (wishes, desires, fears, etc.), so objective relationships can be formulated. We can see what he did before, what happened as a result of it, and the effect it had on his behavior.
Everyday explanations. We tend to explain the behavior of ourselves and others in terms of the purposeful intentions of the individual. He does careful work because he doesn't want to get yelled at by his boss. The explanation is future directed, with an explanatory mechanism (want) that is internal, unobservable, and private.
Pavlovian
conditioning. This is the simplest type of
learning, or conditioning. Basically, Pavlovian
Conditioning is all about the fact that we learn to
associate new relationships between stimuli and
responses to previously existing stimulus-response
relationships. In conditioning, the relationship between
a stimulus and a response is referred to as a reflex.
Ultimately, all Pavlovian Conditioning has at its heart
in-born, or unconditional, reflexes. The term
unconditional is instructive. The relationship exists
unconditionally--the first time, and every time, the
stimulus is presented, the response reliably follows. It is in
the nature of the organism to behave this way. Pavlovian
Conditioning is said to occur when a previously neutral
stimulus becomes associated with an already existing reflex.
This new reflex is conditional upon the stimulus having
been associated with a previously existing reflex.
Operant conditioning. Whereas Pavlovian conditioning involved involuntary behavior that the environment elicited from the organism, operant conditioning involves voluntary behavior that is emitted by the organism is controlled by its consequences. Another way of looking at this difference is to look at the relationship between behavior and the environment. In Pavlovian conditioning, the relationship is stimulus-response (S-->R), but in operant it is response-stimulus (R-->S). Whether responses occur in the future depend upon the nature of the contingency. If it makes life better for the organism, it will likely occur again in the future (reinforcement), and if it makes like worse, it will likely not occur again in the future ( punishment).
Contingency. In operant conditioning, we look for relationships between behavior and the environment in which certain environmental changes reliably follow certain operant performances. This is a pretty formal way of saying that, what's important in operant conditioning is that important changes in the enviroment follow, or are contingent upon, some behavior. In all of the cases we look at in this unit, we look for some behavior, the environmental event that followed, and how that changed the probability of that behavior in the future.
Consequated behavior is behavior which is followed by reinforcement. The term, which is kind of cumbersome and the sort of thing that would drive a Ph.D. in English up the wall, comes from the idea that behavior has consequences, so when it occurs and a consequence is forthcoming, the response has been consequated.
Under the control of environmental contingencies. An organism which has had adequate opportunity to experience what the environment will reinforce and punish eventually comes to behave according to those contingencies. The organism behaves reliably in accordance with those contingencies, producing predictable behavior. When the organism is first starting to come under control of the contingencies, we say that the environment has made contact with the organism.
Parameters. There are lots of dimensions to the things we do, the environment in which we do them, etc. These dimensions can usually be described as lying upon a continuum (in other words, they're quantitative). Take, for example, the size of a Fixed Ratio. Size is a quantitative variable--an FR schedule can range from 1 (continuous reinforcement) to ratios so large that the organism quits responding. A systematic investigation of how responding changes as a ratio changes would be called a parametric analysis.
Paradigm. A paradigm is a fairly coherent way of looking at some aspect of nature. Paradigms make assumptions about the subject under study, and those assumptions define (and restrict) the possible explanations that may be given to accound for the subject. For example, behaviorism and Freudian psychoanalysis are paradigms. The assumptions each make set the limits within which each is likely to give an accounting of an action somebody took.
Superstitious behavior. Most of our behavior is functional, in that there is a causal relationship between the behavior and its consequences. But we all engage in some forms of nonfunctional behavior, in that there is no causal relationship between the behavior and reinforcement, but we do it anyway. Behaviorists call this nonfunctional behavior superstitious. Many culturally generated superstitions are well known, such as knocking on wood to keep bad luck from happening, carrying a rabbit's foot for good luck, or avoiding stepping on cracks (stepping on one would supposedly break your mother's back--oops. Sorry Mom!). Other superstitions are idiosyncratic, in that they derive solely from the personal experience of the individual. What they all have in common is that their maintenance derives from the fact that at one time there was an accidental relationship (temporal contiguity) between the behavioral and some important consequence. So, if superstitious behavior, in which there is temporal contiguity but not contingency, occurs, then contiguity by itself is a sufficient condition for conditioning to occur. A classic demonstration of superstition in the laboratory was performed by B.F. Skinner in 1948.
Vicarious learning. One of the general classes of behavior that humans in particular (but not exclusively--other animals show vicarious learning as well) demonstrate is that we learn to profit from observing the behavior of others. For example, in class, we watch the behavior of other students, and learn the types of comments that are reinforced by the professor, and which ones are punished. If an attempt at sophomoric humor produces a sarcastic response by the professor, we don't have to experience that censure ourselves to know that it's something we don't want to try. Vicarious learning is sometimes vaguely considered not "behavioristic" by students, in the sense that it is not categorized as easily as much of what behaviorists talk about. But keep in mind that what is really important in conditioning theory is that we are a product of our past interactions with the environment, and that behavior is adaptive. If it is adaptive to learn from the behavior of others, and that seems pretty clearly the case, then it would make sense that the environment would select for those individuals who were wired to learn vicariously. This isn't nearly as mystical as it might appear at first. Vicarious behavior can be seen as an example of stimulus control, in that the behavior of others: