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OES the incidence of behavior for social contact with other people increase following a period of social deprivation? Stated in more general terms, are there social drives that function in a manner similar to the primary appetitive drives? This is the central question to which this investigation addresses itself, employing young children as subjects (Ss).Short-term procedures (other than learning operations) that account for variance in the effectiveness of a reinforcer (or in behavior output) are ordinarily labeled drive operations. One notable operation of this type in the case of the primary appetitive drives evolves from the fact that relevant stimuli (e.g., food, water) acquire maximal reinforcing value for an organism only subsequent to its recent deprivation of them. Other reinforcers of no apparent biological importance, like that provided by the opportunity to make a brief observation response, appear also to be raised in effectiveness following preceding periods of deprivation (2), In this context, it is a provocative question whether social reinforcers (those dispensed by people), postulated to possess reinforcing value through a history of conditioning, respond in a similar manner to deprivation. The relevance of this hypothesis accrues both from these precedents and also from the extensive use of the deprivation concept in a number of conceptual systems dealing with general behavior (e.g., 11, 13, 18, 19) and social behavior (e.g., 1, 7, 17, 20).There is a considerable body of evidence (3,8,12,21,22) showing that an experimenter can increase the relative frequency of an

Maternal vocal imitation of infant vocalizations is highly prevalent during face-to-face interactions of infants and their caregivers. Although maternal vocal imitation has been associated with later verbal development, its potentially reinforcing effect on infant vocalizations has not been explored experimentally. This study examined the reinforcing effect of maternal vocal imitation of infant vocalizations using a reversal probe BAB design. Eleven 3-to 8-monthold infants at high risk for developmental delays experienced contingent maternal vocal imitation during reinforcement conditions. Differential reinforcement of other behavior served as the control condition. The behavior of 10 infants showed evidence of a reinforcement effect. Results indicated that vocal imitations can serve to reinforce early infant vocalizations.

This paper 1st deals with generalized imitation, which is assumed to represent a functional response class containing a potentially unlimited number of instrumental responses, varied in content and matched to response-provided cues from many models (or from 1), which is acquired through extrinsic reinforcement (by reinforcing agents) of some members of that response class and is subsequently maintained by intermittent extrinsic reinforcement. The matching-to-sample conditional discrimination-learning paradigm is presented as an analogy. In life settings, this discriminated-operant conception can account for cases of observational learning, as well as for the pervasiveness of generalized imitation, the focusing of it on 1 model, and its occurrence in situations where the model is absent or where there is no extrinsic reinforcement for imitation. This mechanism can apply as well to imitation of more general attitudes or values, which may result in behaviors that are topographically quite different from the model's. The paper next examines the identification process, by which a child is said to acquire the motives, values, and ideals of another (or others), and proposes the generalized-imitation paradigm, cued and reinforced by social stimuli, as a parsimonious basis for the phenomena usually grouped under identification. Fear or anxiety are not critical for identification under the model advanced. At the same time, rather than being either a precondition for, or an outcome of, imitationidentification, dependence-attachment to the model is conceived to be relevant to imitation-identification only insofar as it is an abstraction that indexes the discriminative and reinforcing value for the child of stimuli dispensed by the model or others, and is of limited theoretical relevance when both abstractions are reduced to issues of stimulus control over responses, as in the functional analysis presented.