http://www.tjhsst.edu/Psych/ch6/biological.htm
Brelands and Instinctual
drift
Up to this point, we've been talking about conditioning as if it occurred in a vacuum – that organisms come into the environment as a tabula rasa, capable of learning any one thing as easily as anything else. But organisms bring a rich genetic endowment to theirinteractions with the environment, and their inheritance influences what they are likely to do, when they are likely to do it, and their capacity for learning certain kinds of connections between their behavior and environmental contingencies. When there is a conflict between learned and instinctual behavior, organisms sometimes. Why do things that don't fit the simple model of conditioning first put forth by John B. Watson, and to a lesser extent B. F. Skinner. In the 1950's, some behaviorists came to call these conflicts between learned and instinctual behavior misbehavior. Misbehavior occurs when the contingencies of reinforcement alone can not explain the behavior of the organism.
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The term misbehavior comes from a 1961 American Psychologist
article by Keller and Marion Breland
entitled The Misbehavior of Organisms. The title was a playful jab at B.
F. Skinner, their mentor, whose 1938
book The Behavior of Organisms is widely viewed as the seminal work in the development of the experimental analysis
of behavior. In this article, the
Breland's talked about how their conditioning of animals was more or less difficult depending on the species-specific
behaviors of the animals they were training. For example, teaching a chicken to "dance" is pretty
easy--as it waits for food, chickens
naturally "scratch" at the ground, which resembles dancing.
Trying to train a chicken to stand
still to obtain food, however, is quite difficult. If you are a chicken, you
scratch the ground when obtaining
food is likely. Chickens don't stand around waiting for food. It's in the
nature of the beast to scratch. You can try your best to reinforce a chicken
for standing still, but it just won't do it. The closer it gets to the time
when food will be presented, the more difficult the chicken finds it to stand
still, even if standing still is what's being reinforced. The reason why the Brelands considered this
to be misbehavior is that it should be just as easy to shape a chicken for
standing still as for scratching if in fact all operants are created equal. But there is a wired-in
(biological) connection between scratching and foodfor a chicken.
How does
misbehavior affect the general applicability of
conditioning
principles?
Instinctive Drift-- The classic example of misbehavior
described by Keller and Marion
Breland. While training animals to perform "human" type
actions for TV commercials,animals would perform well for a while, then their
behavior would deteriorate for no apparent reason -- they were still being
reinforced, etc., but the control exerted by the contingencies of reinforcement
were no longer maintaining the behavior. But themisbehavior was nonrandom --
there was a characteristic pattern to the deterioration of the operantly maintained behavior. For
example, if a pig was being conditioned to put a coin in a piggy bank (I remember seeing this ad as a youth
growing up in Los Angeles, where the
Brelands had their business), everything would go fine for a while, but then
the pig would get into rooting the
coin around the floor, and the reinforced chain of behaviors would break down. The Brelands saw this
as misbehavior in that the principles of behavior would suggest that any behavior that does not lead to
reinforcement would be dropped, yet
this behavior, even though it delayed, or even prevented reinforcement, not
only developed but became more elaborate. Why would the pig misbehave? Well,
pigs will be pigs. Pigs, by their genetic nature, root their food. The coin is
associated with food, so the pig starts rooting the coin. Racoons, in a similar
training situation, began washing the coin, a typically raccoon thing to do.
The significance of this misbehavior was not lost on other behaviorists, and the work of the Brelands lead to a
revolution in the scientific
analysis of behavior, the result of which we will explore in the final
unit of the semester.
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Autoshaping:
Autoshaping - an animal will automatically condition itself
instinctually if motivated. Pigeons peck at an illuminated disc prior
to eating. This learn to do this automatically.
Autoshaping. Normal shaping of a pigeon to peck a key,
using successive approximations, takesabout an hour to get a naive pigeon to
peck the key reliably. Suppose, though, instead of thelaborious process of
successive approximations, we simply arrange some programmingequipment to
present a hungry pigeon with grain once a minute, turn on the key light
tenseconds before each presentation of food, go get a cup of coffee, and come
back later and seewhat happened? That's all autoshaping is. Keypecks, when they
eventually occur, are reinforced
with food, just like with regular shaping. Yet, the
pigeon does come to peck the key with this procedure, and in about half the
time that it makes to condition it by successive approximations. As is true
with many of the examples ofmisbehavior, autoshaping was viewed as a curiosity
when experiments demonstrating it were
first published. The curiosity came from the fact that,
even though no specific response wasbeing reinforced, autoshaping produced
conditioning more rapidly than when a specificresponse was being shaped. People
soon recognized the Pavlovian nature of the autoshaping procedure, and began
talking about the elicitation of what is normally considered an operant
response.
28@222
Superstition and the infamous .5
Skinner experiment serendipity
4
direct test of the law of
effect
the non-contingent
free-feeder
strut, flap, turn circles,
Multiple responses
Describe as narrowing of
response repertoire
Staddon and Simmelhag
virtual replication--pecking only and auto shaping
What about superstitious
behaviors:
1) bowling
2) grandmother
3) rain dancing
4) sports
4) ladder and black cats
Superstition and .5 and lack
of contingency
internal external control
Julian Rotter
Brady and the executive
monkey
Politics: Irish, My bet that
if you found a group of individual who had very little control over their
destiny
you would most likely find a
higher percentage of superstitious behaviors.religious uneducated welfare
http://www.psychology.uiowa.edu/Faculty/wasserman/Glossary/Superstitious%20behavior.html
Page 5
The infamous .5
Superstitious behavior arises when the delivery of a
reinforcer or punisher occurs close together in time(temporal contiguity) with
an independent behavior. Therefore, the behavior is accidentally reinforced
orpunished, increasing the likelihood of that behavior occurring again.
For example, you walk under a ladder and a minute later
you trip and fall. It is easy to attribute your
accident to "bad luck" and the irrelevant
ladder. The reason an association is easy to form is because your
cultural belief that walking under a ladder will bring
bad luck is positively reinforced by your fall that
occurred soon after walking under the ladder.
Common North American Superstitions
Here's a
sampling of what we've collected to date. Most North American kids know this
one:
1) Step on a crack, break
your mother's back....
2) backwards, you're in for a
pleasant surprise!
About itching (probably passed on from many cultures):
3) Itchy ear, someone's talking about you; itchy nose, you'll kiss a
fool;
4)itchy rightpalm, you'll meet someone new; itchy left palm, money's
coming, itchy feet, you're on your
way somewhere.
Most of us are willing to take a few extra steps because:
5) It's bad luck to walk under
a ladder.
6) It's bad luck to have a
black cat cross your path.
7) carrying a rabbit's foot in
our pockets
8) bringing a stick of coal
to a friend's home, New Year's day