Vicarious Conditioned Reinforcement in Children

Vicarious reinforcement is a result of earlier learning

“…The matching response must be directly reinforced, at least occasionally; if not, the matching response will extinguish. These studies support the hypothesis that the role of historical and contextual variables must be included Nevertheless, there is well-established contradictory evidence that vicarious reinforcement can lead to response increases (Arenson, 1976;Bandura, 1965;Bandura, Ross & Ross, 1963;Dubner, 1973;Levy, McClinton, Rabinowitz & Wolkin, 1974;Rice, 1976;Walters, Parke & Cane, 1965 (Arenson, 1976;Bandura, 1965;Bandura, Ross & Ross, 1963;Dubner, 1973;Levy, McClinton, Rabinowitz & Wolkin, 1974;Rice, 1976;Walters, Parke & Cane, 1965). The subjects in these studies first observed modeled contingencies, then were tested for imitation.…”

“…The behavior-analytic hypothesis that repeated observation of a model's behavior and its consequence functions as a discriminative stimulus for the observer's behavior does not readily explain Arenson's (1976) finding that subjects in the 'observation' condition performed better than those who received direct reinforcement ('alone' subjects). Under this hypothesis one would expect the performance of these two groups to be comparable.…”

“…The literature shows that vicarious reinforcement procedures can facilitate imitative responding (Arenson, 1976;Bandura, 1965b;Bandura, Ross & Ross, 1963;Kanfer, 1965;Rice, 1976 (Gewirtz, 1971a).…”

“…The crux of this debate is whether consequences must be involved for change in behavior or whether, as proposed by Bandura (1965a), vicarious processes in lieu of consequences of behavior can affect that behavior. The In a study by Arenson (1976), preschool subjects' behavior of inserting a stylus into a hole was nominally reinforced intermittently with candy preceded by the onset 37 of a light ('Alone' group). Subjects in the 'Observation' group witnessed the same behavior contingencies when the task was performed by a model, and subjects in the 'Control' group had no exposure to the task prior to the test phase.…”

“…among young children is robustly established (Arenson, 1976;Levy, McClinton, Rabinowitz & Wolkin, 1974;Walters, Parke & Cane, 1965). However, there is equally strong evidence that, under certain conditions, vicarious reinforcement results in response reduction rather than increase (Bol & Steinhauer, 1990;Deguchi, Fujita & Sato, 1988;Ollendick, Dailey & Shapiro, 1983;Ollendick & Shapiro, 1984 Subjects were tested in same-sex pairs (except for two pairs).…”