BEHAVIORAL THEORY OF TIMING

长期目标是发展和检验一种新的理论 关于控制行为，这些行为是由 在这种环境中强化事件。 启发过程 可以被描述为泊松-发射极型的起搏器-累加器 系统，其速率常数与 加强环境。 这种概念化，或 其变体（例如，正规近似或递归过程 在累加器以及起搏器中具有误差），允许 在许多条件作用下， situations. 假设的比例之间的比率 内部时钟（起搏器）和强化率是一个弧度- 滑稽的一。 它对心理健康问题的影响在于， 需要从根本上重新定位我们的观念， 强化和惩罚控制行为。 你比如说 钢筋梯度的延迟不会是一个常数，但会 在更丰富的环境中变得更陡峭。 我们会评估这个理论 既针对现有的数据，也针对许多提出的经验， 的部分。 这些建议涉及的问题是， 在估计时间， 起搏器的速度与环境的丰富性， 在起搏器的速度被标准化的背景下， 以及可能调节精细尺度的替代机制 时间的判断。 这些实验通常是 非人类受试者的心理物理条件反射实验 (rats和鸽子），并将服务于两个测试具体 预测，并评估该理论的尝试性扩展， 行为和激励对比、费率法以及延迟的选择 咖啡机。

The long-term objective is to develop and test a new theory concerning the control of behaviors that are regularly elicited by reinforcing events in that environment. The elicitation process may be described as a poisson-emitter type of pacemaker-accumulator system, one whose rate constant is proportional to the rate of reinforcement in the environment. This conceptualization, or variants of it (e.g., normal approximations, or recurrent processes with error in the accumulator as well as the pacemaker), permits specific predictions to be made in numerous conditioning situations. The assumption of proportionality between the rate of the internal clock (pacemaker) and rate of reinforcement is a rad- ical one. It has implications for mental health issues in that it entails a fundamental reorientation of our notions about how reinforcement and punishment controls behavior. For instance, the delay of reinforcement gradient will not be a constant, but will become steeper in richer environments. We will evaluate the theory both against extant data, and against numerous proposed experi- ments. These address the issues of the mediating role of adjunctive behavior in the estimation of time, of the variation in the speed of the pacemaker with the richness of the environment, of the context over which the speed of the pacemaker is normalized, and of alternate mechanisms that may mediate the fine-scale judgments of time. The experiments will typically be psychophysical conditioning experiments with non-human subjects (rats and pigeons), and will serve both to test specific predictions, and to evaluate tentative extensions of the theory to behavioral and incentive contrast, rate laws, and choice of delayed reinforcers.