Responses compete and collaborate, shaping each others’ distributions: Commentary on Boakes, Patterson, Kendig, and Harris (2015).

Abstract

Boakes, Patterson, Kendig, and Harris (2015) showed that schedule-induced drinking (SID), typically concentrated in the first half of the interpellet interval, is not moved there exclusively by competition from magazine entries, and that not all arbitrary responses can be maintained by adventitious reinforcement. They attribute such inferences to Killeen and Pellón (2013) and Patterson and Boakes (2012), and on that basis reject their explanation for the excessive nature of many adjunctive responses as a result of reinforcement. It is a mistaken attribution, as Killeen and Pellón emphasized that reinforcers act on many competing interim and terminal responses. That attribution is a minor oversight on the authors' part; their return to a discredited motivational account is, however, a major blunder. It discards the seminal recent advances in understanding the nature of schedule-induced responses (e.g., those of Patterson and Boakes), and even the positive contributions of their own article: Their data show very strong correlations between magazine entries and drinking, providing much more evidence for response competition than their microanalysis provides against it.

Reinforcement of schedule-induced drinking in rats by lick-contingent shortening of food delivery

“…Specifically, it has been proposed (Killeen & Pellón, 2013) that adjunctive behavior is maintained by delayed reinforcement, occurring despite the absence of any programmed contingency between the behavior and the consequence, because traces of behaviors of this kind decay at a slow rate, thus maintaining sufficient strength even when the behavior is separated in time from the occurrence of the reinforcer. Furthermore, Pellón and Killeen (2015) have recently emphasized that the postfood location of licking is due to its elicitation by food and by competition from other behaviors dominating later in the interfood interval.…”

Can surprising nonreward and adjunctive behavior influence each other?

“…Thus, the fact that partial reinforcement training only subtly affected the subsequent development of the adjunctive behavior of wheel running (Experiment 1), as well as the absence of transfer obtained in Experiment 2 during extinction, could indicate a lack of a frustration component during the intermittent reinforcement training. The present weak support for a mediational role of frustration counterconditioning to account for transfer to and from adjunctive behavior becomes meaningful if one considers adjunctive behavior as resulting from food reinforcement, in agreement with past (Killeen & Pellón, 2013;Pellón & Killeen, 2015) and current evidence (e.g., Álvarez, Íbias, & Pellón, 2016). Frustration counterconditioning should be expected to play a significant role if one looks at behavior as a stream of organized activities (adjunctive behavior) aiming at reward seeking, rather than considering the reduction of frustration as the source of reinforcement for adjunctive behavior.…”

“…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.…”

The basis of behavioral momentum in the nonlinearity of strength

“…9;Seligman, 1970) or because of explicit highlighting of them (Lieberman, Davidson, & Thomas, 1985;Williams, 1991), may tolerate longer delay of reinforcement than others. This argument was developed into models of response competition that successfully captured response organization across interincentive intervals (Pellón & Killeen, 2015). This line-multiple response streams supported by the same incentive, competing or collaborating with the target response-also formed the basis of a recent model of behavioral contrast (Killeen, 2014b).…”

“…This has two effects: It increases the contextual rate of incitement, and thus arousal and mass (ar, m), and it also reinforces both target and nontarget responses (the second principle of MPR). Nontarget responses compete with the target response, and may decrease target response rate (or not, depending on the proximity between target responses and the added reinforcers: Killeen, 1981b;Pellón & Killeen, 2015). Such incitement has been found to increase persistence, and this has been shown in numerous species.…”