Adjunctive behaviors are operants

Abstract

Adjunctive behaviors such as scheduleinduced polydipsia are said to be induced by periodic delivery of incentives, but not reinforced by them. That standard treatment assumes that contingency is necessary for conditioning and that delay of reinforcement gradients are very steep. The arguments and evidence for this position are reviewed and rejected. In their place, data are presented that imply different gradients for different classes of responses. Proximity between response and reinforcer, rather than contingency or contiguity, is offered as a key principle of association. These conceptions organize a wide variety of observations and provide the rudiments for a more general theory of conditioning.Keywords Adjunctive . Conditioning . Contingency . Contiguity . Proximity . Schedule inducedResponse acquisition with delayed reinforcement is a robust phenomenon that may not depend on a mechanically defined response or an immediate external stimulus change to mediate the temporal gap between response and reinforcer. Critchfield and Lattal (1993, p. 373) Schedule-induced drinking as the prototypical adjunctive behavior: Arguments against reinforcement Ever since the laboratory discovery of adjunctive behavioralso known as schedule-induced or interim behavior-by John Falk (1961), analysts have treated these anomalies as belonging to a separate class of behavior, induced by incentives such as periodic food, but not reinforced by them. The discovery of adjunctive behavior was a bombshell in the behavioral community, since it seemed an exception to the orderly account of all behavior subsumed under the tripartite hegemony of operant, respondent, and unconditioned responses. What were the implications for the Skinnerian project of applied behavior analysis, if so substantial a proportion of the behavior that was induced by reinforcement was adamant to control by reinforcement? In the case of schedule-induced polydipsia, Falk (1971) voiced the contemporary amazement:It was an outright absurd [finding]. It was absurd because food deprivation in rats yields a decrease in water intake, not an increase. It was absurd because heating a large quantity of room-temperature water to body heat and expelling it as copious urine is wasteful for an animal already pressed for energy stores by food deprivation. It is absurd for an animal to drink itself into a dilutional hyponatremia bordering on water intoxication. But perhaps most absurd was not the lack of a metabolic or patho-regulatory reason for the polydipsia, but the lack of an acceptable behavioral account. (p. 577) Falk detailed the arguments against various "acceptable behavioral accounts," which he summarized in the following: "Polydipsia is not the result of food delivery directly or adventitiously reinforcing water intake. Nor does it serve a problem-solving mediational, or timing function. Furthermore, drinking is not an unconditioned

Can surprising nonreward and adjunctive behavior influence each other?

“…Similar excessive behaviors were also reported under intermittent food schedules (see Killeen & Pellón, 2013;Wetherington, 1982). The fact that such excessive behaviors were not contingent with food delivery, as well as the apparent lack of contiguity with the reinforcer, led to conceptualize these behaviors as different from reinforced behavior.…”

“…Just as adjunctive drinking has been shown to increase immediately after food delivery, adjunctive running seems to be more widely distributed throughout the IRI. Such a difference has implications for theories that pose that adjunctive behavior is also the result of instrumental reinforcement (Killeen & Pellón, 2013). If PR training in the runway induced a sort of intermittent goal approach in Thomka and Rosellini's experiment, this could have interfered with the distribution of other behaviors, thus leading to intermittent drinking.…”

“…If intermittent reinforcement (but not massed-food delivery) induces counterconditioned frustration due to pairings between wheel running and food reinforcement (given their relative temporal proximity; see Killeen & Pellón, 2013), then animals exposed to intermittent reinforcement in Phase 1 should exhibit increased resistance to extinction in Phase 2 relative to massed-food controls. Notice that Phase 2 training does not involve counterconditioning since animals are trained under CR, but it does involve frustration when animals are shifted to extinction.…”

“…Different explanations of adjunctive behavior have been offered (see Baum, 2012;Boakes, Patterson, Kendig, & Harris, 2015;Killeen & Pellón, 2013;Pellón & Killeen, 2015). Such hypotheses can be grouped into three classes.…”

“…Clark (1962) posed that adjunctive behaviors could be subject to adventitious reinforcement. Killeen and Pellón (2013) noted the lack of contiguity between adjunctive behaviors and reinforcement, but still suggested that they are regulated by the same mechanisms underlying operant behavior. According to this view, preexisting behaviors are reinforced according to their proximity to reinforcement and therefore compete for expression.…”