Effect of Prior Effort on Reward Value

描述（申请人提供）：动物行为研究 被认为是人类独有的特征， 物种行为相似性的进化理论。更重要 也许，人类行为的动物模型往往鼓励识别 对人类行为的简单描述， 文学例如，对动物的研究迫使人们重新审视 假设证明刺激等效的能力需要 语言能力它也导致了账户的 传递性推理的现象，比许多人提出的更简单 发展心理学家（如命题逻辑或 刺激的线性表示）。在本提案中，我们将 在动物中研究一种社会心理现象，当在动物中发现时， 被称为“认知失调”“更具体地说，“价值伦理” 或“努力的理由”，这可以被描述为归因于 更大的努力带来更大的回报价值，被认为取决于 关于人类需要解决的不和谐，大概是由 付出更大的努力以获得同等的回报。我们发现 鸽子也会表现出类似的行为（高强度的刺激后， 响应优先于遵循低努力响应的那些）。我们 根据一种对比形式来解释这种行为，在这种情况下， 被描述为在经历的享乐状态中相对较大的改善 在高努力反应结束和奖励信号之间。我们 建议（1）检查努力和奖励价值之间的函数关系， (2)确定对比的来源，（3）检查的一般性 效果，（4）实验区分努力和延迟， 强化，（5）确认是奖励的价值得到了提高 通过先前的努力，和（6）确定为什么它是甚至消极的歧视， 刺激显示了这种效果。拟议的研究应该具有重要意义 对认知失调理论以及其他 人类社会行为的心理学理论。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The investigation in animals of behavior thought to be characteristic of humans alone can serve to support the an evolutionary theory of similarity of behavior among species. More important perhaps, animal models of human behavior often encourage the identification of simpler accounts of human behavior than typically found in the psychological literature. For example, research with animals has forced the reexamination of the hypothesis that the ability demonstrate stimulus equivalence requires verbal ability. It has also led to accounts of the phenomenon of transitive inference that are simpler than those proposed by many developmental psychologists (e.g. propositional logic or the linear representation of stimuli). In the present proposal we will investigate in animals a social psychological phenomenon that, when found in humans has been called "cognitive dissonance." More specifically, "worth ethic" or "justification of effort," which can be described as the attribution of greater value to rewards that follow greater effort, has been thought to depend on the human need to resolve the dissonance presumably engendered by the exertion of greater effort to obtain comparable rewards. We have found that pigeons will demonstrate similar behavior (stimuli that follow a high effort response are preferred over those that follow a low effort response). We interpret that behavior in terms of a form of contrast, which in this case can be described as the relatively greater improvement in hedonic state experienced between the end of the high effort response and the signal for reward. We propose to (1) examine the functional relation between effort and reward value, (2) determine the source of the contrast, (3) examine the generality of the effect, (4) distinguish experimentally between effort and delay to reinforcement, (5) confirm that it is the value of the reward that is enhanced by prior effort, and (6) determine why it is that even negative discriminative stimuli show this effect. The proposed research should have important implications for theories of cognitive dissonance as well as other psychological theories of human social behavior.