Quantificação da lei do efeito: I. o comportamento como escolha, um exercício de elaboração de teoria científica

A análise experimental do comportamento se dedica à descoberta de relações funcionais entre o comportamento e o ambiente dos organismos. Entretanto, os elementos ou unidades dessas relações são conceituais, emergindo como produtos criativos e dialético de experimentação e teoria. A medida que a base empírica de qualquer ciência progride, suas unidades fundamentais tendem, inexoravalmente, a se tornar cada vez mais abstratas. Isso não quer dizer, porém, que se tornem hipotéticas Num certo momento, os dados empíricos são tantos que as relações entre unidades exigem um paradigma matemático que possa sumariar o vasto conjunto de dados em uma representação única, porém precisa.A quantificação da lei do efeito de Herrnstein (1970) oferece uma ilustração contemporânea dessa evolução conceitual, pela sua formulação e refinamento das idéias complementares de força da resposta e valor do reforço. Pode-se traçar um notável paralelo entre esse avanço teórico atual na análise experimental do comportamento e a conceituação e medida de temperatura e calor na termometria do século XVIII (AU)

Concurrent performances: a baseline for the study of conditioned anxiety.

Three rats were trained to lever press on concurrent random interval 2-min random interval 2-min schedules of milk reinforcement. With a 5-sec changeover delay, relative response rate matched the relative reinforcement duration associated with each lever. A stimulus, during which unavoidable shocks occurred at random intervals, was superimposed on this concurrent baseline, and shifts in preference were found. However, data from this procedure were ambiguous, apparently confounded by shock-elicited response bursts. Termination of the shocks during the stimulus resulted in a rapid recovery of matching, which was preceded by a brief facilitation of responding on the less-preferred lever. The procedure was then changed to a conventional conditioned anxiety paradigm with a variable duration pre-shock stimulus. A marked shift in relative response rate towards the preferred lever was found in all three rats; that is, responding on the preferred lever was far less suppressed during the pre-shock stimulus than responding on the less-preferred lever.

Analysis of response rates during stimulus generalization.

In the presence of one click frequency, the presses of two hungry rats on one of two levers were reinforced with food on variable-interval schedules; in the presence of a different click frequency, presses on the other lever were reinforced. In stimulus generalization tests, a variety of click frequencies were presented and reinforcement withheld. The test stimuli were found to exert control over which of the two levers the rats pressed, but not over the rate of pressing the selected lever. The results were interpreted as further evidence that intermediate rates in generalization gradients may be the result of the alternation of several distinct behavior patterns.

Probability of response and probability of reinforcement in a response-defined analogue of an interval schedule.

Variable interval (VI) responding was hypothesized to be a function of differential reinforcement susceptibilities of various unspecified behavior chains that mediate interresponse times (IRTs). To test this hypothesis, probabilities of reinforcement were regulated for the lengths of chains of key pecking responses of pigeons, analogous to the way that VI regulates probabilities of reinforcement for IRTs. This procedure generated a number of VI-like effects, supporting the notion that VI behavior can be construed as a special case of an interaction between the organism's function relating reinforcement susceptibilities to chain length and the experimenter's function relating probabilities of reinforcement to chain length.