Re: Finding useful functions- part 1

From: Stargazer (fuckoff_at_spammers.com)
Date: 11/06/04 

Date: Sat, 6 Nov 2004 10:03:17 -0200

Wolf Kirchmeir wrote:
> Stargazer wrote:
> [...]>
> >
> > The control of reinforcement schedules in an experimental setting
> > (no matter if with fishes or mermaids) will inform you about how
> > the animal reacts to artificially controlled reinforcement
> > schedules. That's part of what I call "artificial environments". It
> > will not inform you much about how the animal acts in natural
> > environments, where contingencies are completely different.
>
> It's not clear what you mean by contingencies, not why you think that
> natural ones would have different effects than artifcial ones. The
> reinforcemnt schedule? The reinforcers? The animal's responses to the
> reinforcers? The discriminators? Etc?
>
> Just what do you think you are talking about?

It is an unwarranted assumption to suppose that studying particular
schedules of reinforcement will generalize to natural settings,
where these schedules will never happen sequentially (besides
being intermixed with different sets of stimuli). Additionally,
what behaviorists study is not an animal's response to specific
stimuli, but the responses to what the animal _understands_
of those stimuli. This may lead to false conclusions, because the
experimenter observes ("perceives") the stimuli in a different
way than the animal being tested. If that is not enough, there's
the effect of neural plasticity. Schedules of reinforcement,
operant reinforcement, generalization and discrimination studies,
etc., all affect the organism's ability to respond to what the
experimenter set up. The organism becomes more "apt" to produce
particular behaviors that are a function of what the experimenter
contrived. This leads not to an understanding of the true behavior
of an animal, but to how behaviors of these animals change in
face of a predefined (and artificial) schedule, and not their
real capacity to handle stimuli from an unpredictable and hectic
natural environment.

*SG*