Re: Finding useful functions- part 1

From: Wolf Kirchmeir (wwolfkir_at_sympatico.ca)
Date: 11/06/04 

Date: Sat, 06 Nov 2004 13:04:25 -0500

Stargazer wrote:
> 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).

Yoy're mistaken if you think that behaviorists can't/won't devise
schedules that don't resemble natural ones. You're further mistaken if
you believe that "intermixing" of stimuli doesn't happen in the
experimental setting. In fact, one of the problems of any experimental
analysis of behaviour is teasing out which stimuli actually produce the
observed effect(s( on the animal's behaviour. It's essentiallu
impossible to reduce the number of stimuli to one.

> 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.

See note above. And just how do you know what an animal "understands"????

> 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.

The notion that "predefined" schedules of reinforcement differ in any
essential way from natural ones is simopky wrong. As a matter of fact,
it was EAB's attempts to refine understanding of how reinforcement
worked that led to the insight that random schedules are the most
powerful in shpaing behaviour. Random schedules are pretty well what
happens in nature. So ---

I'm beginning to understand why DL gets annoyed with comments of the
type you've written. They sound reasonable to anyone who has a
limited/simplistic concept of EAB. Hell, I used to think this way, until
I read some actual EAB.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Finding useful functions- part 1
    ... >> The control of reinforcement schedules in an experimental setting ... experimenter observes the stimuli in a different ... but to how behaviors of these animals change in ...
    (sci.cognitive)
  • Re: Finding useful functions- part 1
    ... >schedules of reinforcement will generalize to natural settings, ... >particular behaviors that are a function of what the experimenter ... but to how behaviors of these animals change in ...
    (sci.cognitive)
  • Re: Finding useful functions- part 1
    ... >> schedules of reinforcement will generalize to natural settings, ... >> being intermixed with different sets of stimuli). ... >limited/simplistic concept of EAB. ...
    (sci.cognitive)
  • Re: Finding useful functions- part 1
    ... >> schedules of reinforcement will generalize to natural settings, ... >> being intermixed with different sets of stimuli). ...
    (sci.cognitive)
  • Re: Finding useful functions- part 1
    ... > Laboratory-based schedules of reinforcement cannot easily duplicate ... Or, conversely, how can behaviorists provide a laboratory ... There's nothing AFAIK that would support the conclusion that in natura ...
    (sci.cognitive)