Revisiting the Role of Bad News in Maintaining Human Observing Behavior

Abstract

Results from studies of observing responses have suggested that stimuli maintain observing owing to their special relationship to primary reinforcement (the conditioned-reinforcement hypothesis), and not because they predict the availability and nonavailability of reinforcement (the information hypothesis). The present article first reviews a study that challenges that conclusion and then reports a series of five brief experiments that provide further support for the conditioned-reinforcement view. In Experiments 1 through 3, participants preferred occasional good news (a stimulus correlated with reinforcement) or no news (a stimulus uncorrelated with reinforcement) to occasional bad news (a stimulus negatively correlated with reinforcement). In Experiment 4 bad news was preferred to no news when the absence of stimulus change following a response to the bad-news option was reliably associated with good news. When this association was weakened in Experiment 5 the results were intermediate. The results support the conclusion that information is reinforcing only when it is positive or useful. As required by the conditioned-reinforcement hypothesis, useless information does not maintain observing.

Suboptimal choice by pigeons: An analog of human gambling behavior

“…This conclusion is supported by a line of research on observing behavior which shows that humans will work to obtain a signal for reinforcement but not a signal for the absence of reinforcement when neither changes the probability of reinforcement. For example, Fantino and Case (1983; see also Fantino & Silberberg, 2010) exposed subjects to a mixed variable time (response independent), extinction schedule in which in one condition, responses produced a stimulus which signaled that the variable time schedule was in effect (a presumed conditioned reinforcer) and a stimulus which signaled that the extinction schedule was in effect (a presumed conditioned inhibitor). In a second condition, responses produced only the presumed conditioned reinforcer (when it was in effect) and in a third condition, responses produced only the presumed conditioned inhibitor (when it was in effect).…”

Conditioned reinforcement and backward association

“…Furthermore, chain schedules have been implemented in children (Long, 1963), and concurrent chain schedules have been studied in adults using a videogame (Leung, 1989(Leung, , 1993. More recently, the observing response procedure (Fantino & Silberberg, 2010) was studied using a video-game. Finally, studies have also reported conditioned reinforcement effects by tokens in a token economies procedure (Kazdin, 1977).…”

Gambling in rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta): The effect of cues signaling risky choice outcomes

“…The mechanisms involved in signal-guided behavior include the informative aspects of the signal to guide adaptive decision-making, which often appears “rational,” and the attentional or motivational aspects of the win-signal that disproportionately encourages the seeking out of “good news” even when seeking good news is not always adaptive to the situation – a situation which often appears “irrational.” Rats (Nevin & Mandell, 1978), pigeons (Dinsmoor, Browne, & Lawrence, 1972), and humans (Fantino & Silberberg, 2010) have all demonstrated a preference bias towards informative stimuli that are correlated with reward (i.e., seeking “good news”) over equivalently informative stimuli that are correlated with non-reward (i.e., seeking “bad news”). However, pigeons will seek out information that provides bad news as long as the same response occasionally also produces good news (Dinsmoor et al, 1972).…”