Context Effects on Reinforcement

情境对强化的影响

• 批准号: 9306736
• 负责人: Ben Williams
• 金额: $ 21万
• 依托单位: University of California-San Diego
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 1993
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1993-09-01 至 1997-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9306736&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Context; Effects; Reinforcement

9306736 Williams Research on animal learning has generally been segregated into the study of Pavlovian conditioning, which involves the association between stimuli and reinforcers, and instrumental (operant) conditioning, which involves the relation between responses and reinforcers. Dr. Williams' recent research has demonstrated striking parallels in how contingency effects operate for the two types of conditioning. He will now extend the analysis to determine in more precise detail whether contingency effects in the two domains depend on the same underlying associative processes. In particular, he asks whether standard measures of the strength of instrumental behavior, rate of reinforcement and choice between different response alternatives, can be explained in terms of the concept of stimulus value as predicted by Pavlovian association theory. This research may revolutionize the conceptual foundations of general theories of learning. The fundamental assumption of learning theory for most of this century has been that "associative strength" is composed of individual increases and decreases in associative value due to individual occurrences of reinforced and nonreinforced behavior. This assumption is challenged by recent findings showing that the animal seems sensitive to the overall rates of reward available in the situation independent of its own behavior. In other words, the animal uses its behavior to estimate these overall reward rates, rather than the reverse causal direction of the reward producing changes in the "strength" of the behavior. At the core of this issue is the viability of associative concepts to provide a reductionistic account of learning. This theoretical issue has ramifications for all of neuroscience, because recent emphases on identifying the neural mechanisms underlying learning and cognition must be predicated on the correct view of the learning processes in order to have any hope of success.

9306736威廉姆斯关于动物学习的研究一般分为巴甫洛夫条件反射研究和工具性(操作性)条件反射研究，前者涉及刺激与强化因子之间的联系，后者涉及反应与强化因子之间的关系。威廉姆斯博士最近的研究表明，这两种条件作用的偶然性效应有着惊人的相似之处。他现在将扩展分析，以更精确地详细确定这两个领域的偶发效应是否取决于相同的潜在关联过程。尤其是，他问，是否可以用巴甫洛夫联想理论预测的刺激值的概念来解释工具行为强度、强化比率和不同反应选择之间的选择的标准衡量标准。这项研究可能会彻底改变一般学习理论的概念基础。在本世纪的大部分时间里，学习理论的基本假设是，“联想强度”是由个人因强化和非强化行为的发生而导致的关联值的增加和减少组成的。这一假设受到了最近的研究结果的挑战，这些发现表明，这种动物似乎对在这种情况下可获得的总奖励率很敏感，而不是与它自己的行为无关。换句话说，动物使用其行为来估计这些总体奖励率，而不是奖励的反向因果方向，从而导致行为的“强度”发生变化。这个问题的核心是联想概念的可行性，以提供对学习的简约论解释。这一理论问题对所有神经科学都有影响，因为最近对识别学习和认知背后的神经机制的重视必须建立在对学习过程的正确看法的基础上，才有任何成功的希望。