At 8:54 AM -0500 11/4/00, Tim Gaines wrote:
>I was interested in the partial reinforcement thread a few days
>ago, but I didn't have time to jump in. I was talking about this
>in my learning class the other day when one of my students objected
>to the definition of "resistance to extinction." She thought that
>a measure of resistance expressed in terms of "the number of
>responses emitted" or "the amount of time that responding continued"
>missed the point. She suggested that the construct should be defined
>as "the number of reinforcements missed during responding on
>extinction." If defined this way, she wondered if there would even
>be a partial reinforcement effect. An animal with a VR-10
>reinforcement history might respond 10 times as much as an animal
>with a CRF history, but both might actually miss the same number
>of reinforcements. Why would we describe the VR animal as showing
>greater resistance to extinction?
>
>Is this a new idea? It is to me, but it makes sense I think. Do
>any of you learning experts out there know if measures like this
>have been recorded and what the results were?
Sounds like the old 'response unit' construct.
On a VR-10 schedule, the response unit would be ten responses, so
resistance to extinction in terms of number of responses would be in units
of ten.
On an interval schedule, you'd use time to extinction, with units scaled to
the interval.
Tony Nevin has incorporated this into his Behavioral Momentum theory, which
cannot be easily summarized.
* PAUL K. BRANDON [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
* Psychology Dept Minnesota State University, Mankato *
* 23 Armstrong Hall, Mankato, MN 56001 ph 507-389-6217 *
* http://www.mankato.msus.edu/dept/psych/welcome.html *
