Resistance to extinction and the pattern of reinforcement: III. The effect of trial patterning in verbal "conditioning."

Effect of prior patterns of experience upon strategies and learning sets.

“…From an analysis of experiments where the pattern of events was changed after experience with a 100:0 pattern (5,9,15), it seemed that the effect of 100:0 reinforcement was to lead tfs into what can be called a "win-stay; lose-shift" strategy or procedure. As long as an alternative was paying off, Ss seemed to be repeating , their choices of it, but shortly after it ceased to pay off, they would switch to the other alternative and stay with it for as long as it paid off.…”

“…The first is a question of the extent to which a particular order of experience teaches one to keep on watching how events occur rather than to regard the problem as solved and requiring only the repetition of previous procedures. This kind of learning set is probably most affected by experience with a number of transitions or reversals (9,11), or by a lower than satisfactory level of success with previous procedures, or by the presence of different but recurring contingencies among events (10).…”

“…We know relatively little about response to changes in the frequency or probability of an event, as in a change from 100:0 payoff to 50:50 and then to 0:100 (9, IS). Recently there has been a trend towards looking at the problem in terms of "patterns of experience" (12,13) and "patterns of reinforcement" (7,8,9) rather than exclusively in terms of simple frequency of reinforcement. Difficulty arises, however, when one comes to describe how it is that a previous pattern of experience affects later responses.…”

“…Difficulty arises, however, when one comes to describe how it is that a previous pattern of experience affects later responses. Hilgard regards previous patterns of experience as affecting Ss' "expectations"; Hake, Grant, and Hornseth (9), following Harlow (11), suggest that "learning sets" are involved. Such terms as expectations and learning sets are notoriously difficult to define, and one would like to be able to describe more specifically the effects of previously experienced patterns.…”

The effect of partial reinforcement on acquisition and extinction of a class of verbal responses.

“…Among the additional variables requiring experimental investigation are the various components which comprise a "pattern of reinforcement." Exploration of some of these components has recently been reported by several authors (2,5).…”