Factors Affecting the Strength of the Vicious Circle Phenomenon

Goal vs. alley punishment after escape training: Massed trials and startbox conditions

“…The failure to obtain an effect of the start procedures in the overall analysis of run speeds may have been prevented by a ceiling effect for the two groups punished in the alley and by a floor effect for the two groups punished in the goalbox. The findings that the guillotine-door procedure produced faster running speeds in extinction for no-punished animals than did the drop-box procedure is inconsistent with the results of an experiment reported by Delprato and Meltzer (1974) and directly the opposite of results reported by Delude (1973). Moreover, in those studies , the guillotine-door procedure did not produce self-punitive respondin g, but it did produce such respondin g in the present study .…”

Starting procedures and the vicious circle phenomenon.

“…As shown in Figure 1, both the D-D and G-D groups continued to leave the start box with short response latencies throughout the test period. The response latencies of the G-G Group, however, showed the same rapid decay found in previous studies when punishment was applied in conjunction with the guillotine door (Delude, 1973). Although the D-D and G-D groups showed no differences in performance as a function of the different treatment received (F < 1), the running speed of the G-G Group was significantly inferior to both the G-D Group (F = 12.29, df = 1/8, p < 0.01) and the D-D Group (F = 49.48, df -1/8, p < 0.01).…”

“…28, No. 2 cent of the rats tested with the gate-lift technique in this study and two previous ones (Delude, 1969(Delude, ,1973 did show marked response persistence in the presence of punishment Perhaps, then, future research should be concerned with isolating those factors which account for the failure of these animals to show a normal inhibitory response to punishment.…”

“…Although a number of published reports (see Brown, 1969, for review) have supported this position, many other researchers have been unable to do so (Carlsmith, 1961;Delude, 1969;Moyer, 1955Moyer, ,1957Seward & Raskin, 1960). Recent studies (Delude, 1973) have suggested that this lack of consistency is due to the use of different experimental procedures.…”

“…When measures of the probability or latency of initiating the abient response are employed, however, no response facilitation results from the application of punishment. In two previous papers (Delude, 1969(Delude, , 1973, it was argued that this later measurement is the only one appropriate for a meaningful test of the vicious circle hypothesis. For all Ss, a 0.5-ma shock remained effective in the second 1-ft section of the runway during testing.…”