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THE ESTABLISHMENT OF STIMULUS CONTROL BY INSTRUCTIONS AND BY DIFFERENTIAL REINFORCEMENT
Author(s) -
Danforth Jeffrey S.,
Chase Philip N.,
Dolan Mark,
Joyce James H.
Publication year - 1990
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.1990.54-97
Subject(s) - reinforcement , stimulus control , differential reinforcement , stimulus (psychology) , differential effects , psychology , reinforcement learning , differential (mechanical device) , computer science , audiology , cognitive psychology , artificial intelligence , neuroscience , social psychology , medicine , nicotine , engineering , aerospace engineering
A repeated acquisition design was used to study the effects of instructions and differential reinforcement on the performance of complex chains by undergraduates. The chains required responding on a series of keys that corresponded to characters that appeared on a monitor. Each day, subjects performed a new chain in a learning session and later relearned the same chain in a test session. Experiment 1 replicated previous research by showing that instructional stimuli paired with the correct responses in the learning sessions, combined with differential reinforcement in both learning and test sessions, resulted in stimulus control by the characters in each link. Experiment 2 separated the effects of instructional stimuli and differential reinforcement, and showed that stimulus control by the characters could be established solely by differential reinforcement during the test sessions. Experiment 3 showed that when a rule specified the relation between learning and test sessions, some subjects performed accurately in the test sessions without exposure to any differential consequences. This rule apparently altered the stimulus control properties of the characters much as did differential reinforcement during testing. However, compared to differential reinforcement, the rule established stimulus control more quickly.