Abstract
This article and Part 2 (Anger, in press) present a new molecular analysis of operant reinforcement and extinction. In this multifactor analysis, response competition can influence extinction, but the present focus is on the influences of other basic extinction processes that can be isolated and studied with procedures that minimize the effects of competing behavior. Part 1 shows that one extinction process, response-specific inhibition (RSI; Anger, 1983), can account for animal sensitivity to complex response contingencies. RSI depends on the same events that determine whether a reinforcer is contingent on a response. RSI can average those event frequencies, combine them into a single variable that varies with the contingency, and adjust responding appropriately. Part 2 uses the findings of Part 1 to derive a rational equation that describes operant responding. This linear additive equation specifies a balance between RSI-augmenting events (e.g., unreinforced responses) and RSI-decrementing events (e.g., reinforced responses). The equation predicts a different relation between responding and reinforcer frequency than do other theories, because it predicts that responding is augmented by an unrecognized variable, unreinforced non-response time during controlling stimuli.
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This research was funded in part by a grant from the Research Council of the Graduate School, University of Missouri—Columbia. This analysis was presented at the Association for Behavior Analysis meeting in Columbus, OH, 1985. The author wishes to thank Kathleen Anger, Lynn Hammond, Eliot Hearst, Richard Herrnstein, Andrew Homer, Duncan Luce, Marjorie Martin, William Timberlake, Trish Vandiver, Edward Wasserman, and Raymond Wolf for valuable comments.
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Anger, D. The balance equation: Part 1. Response-specific inhibition and the operant-contingency puzzles. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 25, 468–471 (1987). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03334743
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03334743