Abstract
This article and the preceding Part 1 (Anger, 1987) present a new molecular analysis of operant reinforcement and extinction. It is a multifactor analysis of the basic extinction processes that can be studied with procedures that minimize competing behavior. Part 1 showed that 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. In Part 2, the findings of Part 1 were used to derive a rational equation that describes operant responding. That 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 nonresponse-time during controlling stimuli.
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References
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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 Marlin, William Timberlake, Trish Vandiver, Edward Wasserman, and Raymond Wolf for valuable comments.
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Anger, D. The balance equation: Part 2. Derivation of the balance equation for response-specific inhibition. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 26, 55–58 (1988). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03334860
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03334860