Re: Finding useful functions- part 1

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Date: Mon, 08 Nov 2004 17:39:21 -0500

Stargazer wrote:
[...]
>
> Behaviorism (and, as I said, other psychologies, including cognitive)
> suffer from a problem known as "lack of ecological validity".
> Laboratory-based schedules of reinforcement cannot easily duplicate
> the kind of intense and unpredictable sequence of events in natural
> environments. Any ethologist (who are used to observe animals in
> natura) will gladly testify this.

Well, I've read a fair amount of ethology, too, including a few original
papers (ie, not just popularised accounts), and what I've read is, as
they say, suggestive. The problem with ethology is that it deals with so
many factors at once that it suffers from what may be called conceptual
muddiness. Konrad Lorenz's notion of "imprinting" is a prime example, IMO.

[...]
> That's exactly my point: no one knows what an animal "understands".

You coulda fooled me. :-)

> Therefore, any conclusion made using stimulus/response structures
> is, in fact, using "experimenter-perceived stimulus/animal responses
> to animal's perceived stimulus". This will, as I said, lead to
> empirical and perhaps conceptual errors. Without grounding behavioral
> experimentation in neuroscientific data and solid theoretical analysis,
> experiments that behaviorists propose are just sophisticated ways
> to mislead oneself.

Well, if I present red and green lights, and find that I can affect an
animal's behaviour by varying the ways in which I present red and green
lights, it seems a pretty safe conclusion that the animal perceives red
and green lights. To test this conclusion further, I can use a variety
of reds and greens that look the same to me, but have different
wavelength combinations. If I find that the presence or absence of some
wavelengths which _I_ cannot perceive makes a difference in the animal's
behaviour, then it seems a pretty safe conclusion that the animal can
perceive types of light that I can't perceive. I recall a classic
experiment that proved bees can see ultraviolet, in fact. But of course,
I can draw this conclusion only if I jettison, or at least sideline, any
concept of perception as an experience.

>Besides, you have not commented on my point
> regarding neural plasticity and the "control" of behavior.

It seems to me obvious that if there were no neural plasticity (among
other things), there could be no change in behaviour. I don't understand
what, exactly, you are objecting to.

[...] 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.

OK, I'll try answer this, insofar as I understand your objection.

The phenomena you have adduced have been discovered by means of EAB.
Moreover, AFAIK, only EAB has been able to provide hard data on the
kind, degree, and variation in plasticity that occurs.

But I still don't understand how you come to the conclusion that an
natural environment will shape an animal's behaviour by different
processes than an artificial one - for that is what your objection
amounts to, or else it is no objection at all. IOW, are you saying that
the kinds of behaviour-shaping contingencies that an experimenter sets
up never occur in nature? Or are you saying that because they are not
pre-defined in nature, they cannot have the same effects? Or are you
saying because they are different in kind from what the animal
encounters in nature, they cannot have the same effects? Are you saying
that because reinforcement schedules in nature random and randomly mixed
that therefore they don't shape behaviour? Are you saying that any
attempts to isolate the variables in reinforcement schedules (for
example) cannot possibly lead to insights into how reinforcement works?
Are you saying that reinforcement doesn't work anywhere except in the
lab? Etc? Sorry, I can not understand what you are objecting to.

>>The notion that "predefined" schedules of reinforcement differ in any
>>essential way from natural ones is simopky wrong.
>
>
> The burden of proof is at your side. Tell us how is it possible that
> a pigeon, in natural environments, will be subjected to anything
> that barely resembles what is done in a laboratory-controlled
> study. Or, conversely, how can behaviorists provide a laboratory
> environment which mimicks what happens in a natural setting.

Er, no, IMO you have to prove that none of the contingencies that an
animal is exposed to in the lab ever occur in nature. You'd also have to
prove that mixing, say, two or more reinforcement schedules prevent any
of them from shaping behaviours as they are observed to do in the
laboratory. And so on.

For that matter, tell me how any natural process resembles a laboratory
experiment. The whole point of laboratory setups is to isolate variables
as much as possible, so that their influence/effects can be studied.

Remember that Skinner tells us that it was the _natural behaviour_ of
the pigeons that he fed on his window sill that roused his interest.
They did so many different things as they assembled on the sill and
waited for him to toss them a few crumbs of bread. Why? If pigeon
behaviour was "completely instinctive", why did it vary so much?

>>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 ---
>
>
> Not exactly. In nature, you have "moderately random schedules". This
> leads to very complex situations, because some classes of responses
> are specific to the context (one pigeon at the ground is subject to
> different circumstances than another in a tree or flying).

That's a quibble. The degree of randomness varies of course, and if you
want, you can measure the effects of different degrees of randomness.
It's just such experiments that showed that certain degrees of
randomness in the reinforcement schedule had very powerful effects on
some behaviours, and in particular on their resistance to change under
subsequent contingencies - including equally random contingencies.
There's nothing AFAIK that would support the conclusion that in natura
these effects would be any different than in the lab.

And all classes of behaviour are specific to some context(s). IOW,
devising an experiment that gets an animal to display the kind of
behaviour under investigation isn't all that easy. It starts with
observing the animal in natura - where it's not clear which
contingencies are having what effects. Etc.

It's also AFAIK lab experiments that have shown that much of what we
call development is a kind of learning - that at certain stages in its
growth to adulthood an animal will change its behaviour when exposed to
contingencies that did not shape its behaviour before. Without lab
experiments, it would be practically impossible to decide whether it was
repeated exposure or timing of exposure that caused the change in
behaviour; etc. The fact that timing is sometimes the predominant factor
raises interesting questions about what happens inside the black box -
but please note that in this case, the question is well defined, which
it is not in the case of a mentalistic question. IOW, EAB provides
results that help guide research in related disciplines, which is not
what one would expect from if the objections to it had the validity.

NB that until EAB provided some hard data, people held the "tabula rasa"
view - that an animal is capable of any behaviour at all, depending on
its experience. This is of course nonsense. Many people mistakenly
believe that it was Skinner's view -- I thought so myself, until I
realised that all his behaviour shaping protocols (as described in
Freedom and Dignity) assumed that some sort of behaviour would occur,
and that only such naturally occurring behaviour could be shaped.

I think we've built on Skinner: for example, we have a better
understanding of some kinds of psychopathic behaviours, which are very
resistant to change - not because of the subject's mind, but because of
his neurophysiology, or so it seems. Etc.

> Then read more EAB, but just don't stop there. Read also what has
> been written *against* EAB. I guarantee that you will learn more about
> behaviorism reading what the critics have to say. And you don't have
> to look for recent things, because these points have been made at least
> 40 years ago. The scientific understanding of the whole issue has
> changed dramatically since the sixties.

References?

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