Discuss the major behavioral hypotheses about the nature of reward

<aside> 💡 Domjan chapter 7 pp196-209 (sections 7-2 through 7-4)

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Response Allocation and Behavioral Economics

• Molar approach that focuses on how instrumental conditioning procedures put limitations on an organism’s activities and cause redistributions of behavior among available response options

Antecedents of the Response-Allocation Approach

• Reinforcer is a stimulus that produces a satisfying state of affairs
• For half a century after Thorndike’s law of effect, people agreed that reinforcers were a special stimuli that strengthened instrumental behavior

<aside> 💡 Consummatory-Response Theory: species-typical consummatory responses are the critical feature of reinforcers

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• First challenge the idea that reinforcers are stimuli
• Special kinds of stimuli to special kinds of responses
• Consummatory responses are different from various potential instrumental responses

<aside> 💡 Premack Principle: Responses that accompany commonly used reinforcers involve activities that individuals are highly likely to perform

• Any high-probability activity can be an effective reinforcer for a response that the individual is not inclined to perform </aside>

• Focuses on the difference in likelihood of the instrumental and reinforcer responses

• Also called the differential probability principle

• Ex: eating reinforces bar pressing because eating is more typical than bar pressing

Applications of the Premack Principle

• Design of reinforcement procedures used to help various clinical populations
• Ex: opportunity to sit is a good reinforcer for patients because they spend a lot of time doing that
• Ex: autistic children
  • Delayed echolalia: repeating words
  • Perseverative behavior: persistent manipulation of an object
  • Opportunity to engage in desired behavior resulted in better performance on the training tasks than food reinforcement
• Behavior → reinforcer