WORK - A WEAK REINFORCER
WORK - A WEAK REINFORCER
复制标题
DOI：
10.1111/j.2164-0947.1970.tb02731.x
复制
发表时间：
1970-01-01
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
COLLIER, GH
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
COLLIER, GH
Spontaneous activity has been studied longer, more persistently, and with less profit than any other single phenomenon in animal psychology. 1-5 Its longevity of interest arises in part from its robustness and in part from its sensitivity to a number of easily manipulable, measurable, and inexpensive, independent variables, such as age, deprivation, temperature, time of day, and sex. The tidiness and reproducibility of spontaneous activity caused it to be a main structural member of most early theories of animal motivation. 6 However, in spite of the attention that it has received, spontaneous activity is still poorly understood.There have been two basic ways of conceptualizing spontaneous activity. The first has been in terms of responsivity, the second in terms of energy regulation. Sherrington7 suggested that spontaneous activity was a reflex elicited by deprivation, the vigor of the reflex varying as a function of the strength of the stimulus. In the animal's economy, spontaneous activity was supposed to play the role of increasing the likelihood of finding a missing dietary item (a view still very strong in the conventional wisdom). Wald and Jacksonu added an ecological corollary to this view, by conjecturing that activity functioned to disperse deprived animals, thus reducing feeding pressure on a given location. The longdominant theoretical notion that spontaneous activity was a measure of drive was derived from Sherrington's reflex view7 of spontaneous activity: Drive caused activity. A somewhat different version of the drive hypothesis is the view that there is an activity drive, and that activity itself is reinforcing. 9.1 Premackll represents a variant of this position. He proposes that there is a base rate for any response which can be modified either by deprivation or by the contingencies between it and other events. Campbell and Sheffield 12 interpreted activity changes in terms of lowered thresholds resulting from deprivation. This view was strongly supported by the conditionability of spontaneous activity. 1: i-'6 Campbell and Lynch'? have suggested a neurological base for the responsivity view in their recent series of papers. LatIB has advanced a similar view of activity in which spontaneous activity is a reflection of central nervous system arousal.
