BEHAVIORAL THEORY OF TIMING

长期目标是开发和测试一种新的理论 关于对经常引发的行为的控制 加强了该环境中的事件。启发式的过程 可以被描述为泊松发射器类型的起搏器-蓄积器 系统，其速率常数与速度成正比 加强对环境的保护。这种概念化，或者 它的变体(例如，正态近似或递归过程 在累加器和起搏器中有误差)，允许 在众多条件下做出的具体预测 情况。比例的假设是指 心脏内部的时钟(起搏器)和强化速率是-- 典型的一种。它对精神健康问题有影响，因为它 需要从根本上重新定位我们关于如何 强化和惩罚控制着行为。例如， 加筋坡度的延迟不会是常量，但会 在更富裕的环境中变得更陡峭。我们将对这一理论进行评估 无论是针对现有数据，还是针对众多拟议的实验- 曼茨。这些都解决了调解作用的问题 时间估计中的附加行为，时间的变化 起搏器的速度与环境的丰富性， 起搏器的速度在其上被标准化的上下文， 以及可能调解细微尺度的替代机制 对时间的判断。这些实验通常会是 非人类受试者的心理物理条件作用实验 (老鼠和鸽子)，并将两者用于测试特定的 预测，并评估理论的试探性扩展到 行为和激励对比、比率法则和延迟选择 增强剂。

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.