Association and the law of effect.

Abstract

Common speech defines acts in terms of their results, not in terms of the movements by which those results are accomplished. We eat a dinner, sail a boat, ride a horse, play a selection on the piano. For each of these acts there may be a thousand different patterns of muscular contraction in the details of the achievement, and the act may still be known by the same name. Skillful and awkward performances of the same act may use very different motions. 'E. A. Culler. Recent advances in some concepts of conditioning. PSYCHOL. REV., 1938, 45, p. 136.

Adaptive behavior from random response

“…Guthrie's (7,8,9) description of puzzle box beha\ ior most closely parallels Ashby's machine-both as to the random emitting of responses, and as to the mode of selection of the adaptive response. For Guthrie, the response that removes the animal from the stimulus situation that instigated the random floundering is strengthened bemuse it is allowed to remain urioverlayed with the traces of other responses.…”

Situational Descriptions of Behavioral Procedures: The in Situ Testbed

“…For instance, issues surrounding the incommensurability of bodily movements and accomplishments that lead to the neural network dilemma are discussed in Weiss (1924Weiss ( , pp. 42-44, 1925, Guthrie (1940), Wittgenstein (1953, §612), Austin (1962, p. 112), Goldman (1970), Lee (1981Lee ( , 1983Lee ( , 1986Lee ( , 1988Lee ( , 1996, and Kemp (1996). Techniques for evaluating the microstructure of behavior are addressed by Mechner (1992), Lee (1996), and Kemp and Eckerman (1995).…”

“…This dilemma, which we call the neural network dilemma, was examined in detail by Weiss (1924Weiss ( , pp. 42-44, 1925; see also Guthrie, 1940, and Lee, 1983. The In Situ approach provides a means of solving this dilemma, thereby permitting the integration of behavioral and neuroscientific data.…”

Handbook of Research Methods in Human Operant Behavior

“…Indeed, the subject may not even look at the point counter . Perhaps the interruption of operant behavior by consummatory or contact behavior contributes to the effect that reinforcers have (Guthrie, 1940;Sheffield, 1966). …”