Lecture 11: Operant Conditioning - Schedules & Choice Flashcards
What is the progressive ratio schedule?
- Increasing response requirement for reinforcer delivery over successive sessions
What is a breaking point? Which schedule of reinforcement is it found in?
- The last completed ratio in an escalating series
- Progressive Ratio
What is the difference b/n ratio and interval schedules?
- Ratio is a much faster rate
- VR motivated much more vigorous instrumental behaviour than VI
- Response rate is not simply a function of how many reinforcers can be earned
What is the phenomenon where familiarity slows acquired control over behaviour?
- CS preexposure/latent inhibition
What do conditioned preparatory responses evoked by drug-associated stimuli contribute to?
- Tolerance
What provides evidence that learning can happen in absence of explicit reinforcement?
- Latent learning
When Ryan brings his dishes in to the kitchen he gets a timbit. The next day, Ryan brings his dishes to the kitchen. What is this an example of?
- Positive reinforcement
Avery is placed on time out and is no longer allowed to play with her train set. Avery does not hit again. This is an example of…
- Negative punishment
How are fixed schedules similar?
- Both show pattern of slowed responding immediately following reinforcement that speed up later
Can pavlovian and operant conditioning mechanisms interact?
- Yes
- Light paired with drug/food can become conditioned reinforcer
What is reinforcement of short inter-response times? In which reinforcement schedules is that found? Is this molar or molecular?
- If participant is reinforced for response that occurs shortly after preceding one, then a short IRT is reinforced and short IRTs become more likely in the future
- If the participant is reinforced for a response that ends in a long IRT, then long IRT is reinforced and more likely to happen in future
- Ratio schedules have no time constraints (faster responding results in faster reinforcement)
- Interval schedules provide little advantage for short IRTs (favour waiting longer)
- Molecular explanation (calculated from one response to the next)
What are feedback functions?
- The relation b/n response rates and reinforcement rates calculated over an entire experimental session or an extended period of time
- In ratio schedules, response rate is directly related to reinforcement rate, with no limit to that function (increasing linear function with no theoretical limit)
- In interval schedules, participants cannot increase reinforcement rate above a certain amount no matter how much they increase response rate (there is an upper limit)
- Molar explanation (calculated across entire session)
- Pay by clients (ratio) vs pay by hour (interval)
What are concurrent schedules?
- Behaviours don’t often occur in isolation
- Usually a choice component involved in which another option was selected against
- Used to study choice behaviour
- Any combination of schedules
- Purpose is to observe how behaviour is distributed across available options and how schedule/reinforcer affects choice behaviour
Which option is most likely to be chosen if the outcome is the same?
- Least work and most reinforcement
What do you measure in order to compare choices in concurrent schedules?
- Relative rate of responding OR relative rate of reinforcement
- BL/(BL+BR)
- In equal distribution b/n schedules, = 0.5
- All behaviour allocated to one side = 1.0
- Enormously sensitive to reinforcement schedule in effect for each response (counterbalance schedules)
