OPERANT CONDITIONING OF EYE MOVEMENT IN THE MONKEY (Macaca nemestrina)¹

Abstract

With the horizontal electrooculographic potential as the operant, four monkeys (Macaca nemestrina) were conditioned to move their eyes at high and low rates by initial use of fixedratio schedules of reinforcement, followed by a changeover to multiple schedules of fixed-ratio reinforcement and discriminated differential reinforcement of low rate. These differences in rate of eye movement were not observed in a control animal given the same patterns of discriminative stimuli and deliveries of the reinforcing agent independent of its eye movements.Eye movement is a response which can be considered to occupy an intermediate position between involuntary and voluntary responses. It is controlled via the oculomotor nuclei, which are also involved in eyelid movement, a response that has been extensively studied using classical conditioning techniques. Although eye movement has occasionally been studied as a classically conditioned response (Deaux and Gormezano, 1963;Zikmund, 1964), operant conditioning of eye movement has not previously been reported. Operant conditioning of this response is of interest, particularly if low rates can be brought under control by a schedule, such as differential reinforcement of low rate (DRL), (Skinner and Morse, 1958;Wilson and Keller, 1953), in which only those responses which terminate interresponse times longer than some particular value (the DRL value) are reinforced. This might seem difficult for a response such as eye movement, in view of its partly involuntary nature and its high normal rate of occurrence compared with most skeletal responses.

REINFORCEMENT OF EYE MOVEMENT WITH CONCURRENT SCHEDULES1

“…The present experiment confirmed previous findings (Berger, 1968;Schroeder and Holland, 1968 a, b) that macrosaccades behave as operant observing responses. Furthermore, the results suggest that the general findings of concurrent scheduling also apply to concurrent eye movements in humans.…”

“…Mackworth and Morandi (1967) showed that subjects, when gazing at photographs, look mostly at the informative elements of the pictures. Mackworth, Kaplan, and Metlay (1964) and Schroeder and Holland (1968a) showed that eye-movement rates are correlated with signal rates on vigilance tasks. Recent experiments with monkeys (Berger, 1968) and with humans (Schroeder and Holland, 1968b) This situation is analogous to concurrent schedules in more usual operant conditioning situations (e.g., Catania, 1966 Catania, 1963). A COD is some specified delay between a switch from one key and the next available reinforcement on the other key.…”

Contingent-Dependent Enhancement of Rhythmic Motor Patterns: AnIn VitroAnalog of Operant Conditioning

“…Modifications of behaviors by operant conditioning have been demonstrated in both vertebrates (Thorndike, 1911;Skinner, 1938;Berger, 1968;Beecher, 1971;Wolpaw, 1987) (see also Engel and Schneiderman, 1984;Byrne 1987) and invertebrates (Horridge, 1962;Hoyle, 1980;Booker and Quinn, 1981;Hawkins et al, 1985;Cook and C arew, 1986;Susswein et al, 1986;Lukowiak et al, 1996). Some cellular modifications induced by operant conditioning have been identified (Woollacott and Hoyle, 1977;Jaffard and Jeantet, 1981;Wyler, 1985;Skelton et al, 1987;Mahajan and Desiraju, 1988;Cook and C arew, 1989;Feng-Chen and Wolpaw, 1996), but the contribution of these cellular changes to the observed changes in the behavior is still poorly understood.…”

Selective eye movements to simultaneously presented stimuli during discrimination

“…Since a saccade is an instrumental response, it is subject to reinforcement variables (Berger, 1968;Sdiroeder & Holland, 1968a, b) and practice (Schaffer & Gould, 1966). In such tasks as the discrimination of simple stimuli, one would expect variables like novelty and complexity to play less of a role in performance than reinforcement for looking at the critical components of a stimulus.…”