Basic Stimulus Control

1. Basic Stimulus Control

2. Thus Far in Operant… • Emphasis on the events following behavior • Differentiation from Pavlovian? • But control from antecedent stimuli also very important • “All behavior is under the exquisitely detailed control of surrounding stimuli, some impinging from outside the organism, others arising from within its boundaries” Dinsmoor (1995)

3. STIMULUS CONTROL Examples: Basic discrimination and generalization, psychophysics, attentional control, conceptual and relational behavior, verbal behavior, remembering, applications to the physiology of perception, learning, and memory.

4. Three-term Contingency SD SR Ro SD: discriminative stimulus Ro: operant class SR: reinforcer

5. What is the SD? • Tracking behavior in time • Control from the past vs. control by the present • Bringing history to bear on current behavior • The power of the SD • How do you get the salt?

6. Discrimination Training • Basic definition • Rf in the presence of one stimulus (S+) • And not in its absence (S-) • Discrimination is acquired • Morse code training in the military (Keller, 1943) • Examples from Pavlovian conditioning

10. Remember generalization tests from Pavlovian?

11. What is generalization and discrimination?

12. Theories of Generalization • Spread of activation • Discrimination hypothesis • Lack of discrimination • Lack of training • The deafened pigeon • Discrimination/Generalization is learned • How would we show that?

14. Compare to This: Have we disproved the hypothesis?

15. Is Discrimination “Observation”? • Dinsmoor’s hypothesis • Observation increases discrimination

16. No differential reinforcement

17. Observing Positive and Negative Stimuli

19. Inhibitory Gradients

20. Combined Gradients

23. Attention • Another one of those things we possess • Controlling relation between stimuli and behavior