Abstract
Human conditioning performance decreases as a function of decreases in reinforcement ratio. It was shown that this effect is not exclusively a result of trial-by-trial increments and decrements associated with unconditioned stimulus presence vs. absence. Decreases in reinforcement ratio also increase the number of trials required before CRs emerge and decrease the limit of operators employed to describe performance once acquisition begins. The latter two effects were interpreted to mean, first, that more time is required by subjects to develop the associative network requisite to response acquisition and, second, that information about reinforcement schedules beyond trial-by-trial effects determines overall boundary conditions of performance. The results were discussed from an information processing perspective that differentiates between the acquisition of knowledge about the schedules and the trial-by-trial feed-back effects that shape performance.
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This research was supported by NSF Grant BNS-75-10471 and PHS Grant MH-31606 to the senior author and by NIH Biomedical Research Support Grant RR07092 to the University of Utah. We would like to acknowledge the technical aid provided by Craig C. Clark, Karol L. Kumpfer, and William Yu-Ming Lee.
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Prokasy, W.F., Williams, W.C. Information processing and the decremental effect of intermittent reinforcement schedules in human conditioning. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 14, 57–60 (1979). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03329399
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03329399