The effect of different amounts of reinforcement upon the acquisition and extinction of a simple running response.

The retention of a simple running response after varying amounts of reinforcement.

“…The acquisition data are in agreement with the results of previous experiments (1,3,4): there is little improvement in response time between trials 4 and 8, and after trial 16, but the response after 16 acquisition trials is clearly more prompt than after 8 trials. The addition of the 4-trial and 32-trial groups apparently confirms the observation (2) that there is no decrease in habit strength over a 24-hour retention period in rats having received less than 16 acquisition trials, but that marked 'forgetting' occurs in animals having received more extended training.…”

A positive relationship between reinforcement and resistance to extinction produced by removing a source of confusion from a technique that had produced opposite results.

“…Under the conditions of his experiment, animals that had received 16 reinforcements reached a criterion of extinction in fewer trials than those that had received only eight reinforcements. This finding was confirmed in part by two other studies employing the same general procedure and apparatus (3,13).…”

“…In view of the theoretical importance of the problem, it seems desirable to see if Finger's results mean that there is no lawful relationship between the number of reinforcements and resistance to extinction or if, on the other hand, they were a function of some aspect of his experimental technique that introduced a disturbing factor counteracting the effects of reinforcement. The fact that Finger's technique has been used in a number of coordinated studies (2,3,5,6,7,8,13,14,15) designed to investigate the variables influencing learning, increases the desirability of determining whether or not it involved such a source of confusion. That the technique may have contained some peculiar factor of this kind is suggested by a second paradoxical result found in the above studies: namely, that animals 494…”

The Repeated Conditioning-Extinction Procedure and Its Relation to Discrimination Learning

“…However, some studies have shown a decrease in resistance to extinction with the number of reinforcements, even though no extinction series were previously interpolated (Finger, 1942 a, b ;Mote, 1944;Capaldi, 1958Capaldi, , 1961Birch et al, 1960). This suggests that, in an attempt to carry out an experiment adopting the procedure in question, some control groups in which Ss do not receive any previous extinction series are needed.…”