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CONTROL OF MYOELECTRICAL RESPONSES THROUGH REINFORCEMENT
Author(s) -
LaurentiLions Lila,
Gallego Jorge,
Chambille Bernard,
Vardon Guy,
Jacquemin Charles
Publication year - 1985
Publication title -
journal of the experimental analysis of behavior
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.75
H-Index - 61
eISSN - 1938-3711
pISSN - 0022-5002
DOI - 10.1901/jeab.1985.44-185
Subject(s) - reinforcement , stimulus (psychology) , conditioning , stimulus control , audiology , psychology , conditioned response , classical conditioning , statistics , mathematics , social psychology , cognitive psychology , medicine , neuroscience , nicotine
A classic experiment by Hefferline, Keenan, and Harford (1959) showed that small thumb‐twitches, imperceptible to the subject, can be controlled by the consequences of terminating and/or postponing aversive noise. These findings were further investigated in three experiments reported here. Experiment 1 replicated the original study. Experiment 2 was a control study in which stimulus changes were presented as in Experiment 1, but independently of the responses. Under these conditions the response rate varied over a large range with no systematic relation to experimental events. The increments in response rate reported by Hefferline et al. were within the present range of variation, suggesting that conditioning in the earlier study may have reflected a consistency in the direction of change rather than an increase in rate beyond the baseline range. In the present experiment, however, the rate increase was absolute. In Experiment 3, analog rather than binary changes in stimulus conditions were used as reinforcement. Under these conditions, the rates of subjects whose responses were conditioned fell from 78% (in the previous experiment) to 31%.