The acquired reward value of an intermittently presented neutral stimulus.

Melching, William H.

doi:10.1037/h0063591

Cited by 32 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…The signaledfood procedure would appear to be more discriminable from training than the free-food procedure-the signalwas added-but less so than extinction-the food was not discontinued. Severaldemonstrations that addinga responsecontingent stimulus facilitates extinction are consistent with this idea that a signal alone might facilitate extinction (e.g., Hurwitz & Cutts, 1957;Melching, 1954).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 51%

Contextual conditioning during free-operant extinction: Unsignaled, signaled, and backward-signaled noncontingent food

Baker

1990

Animal Learning & Behavior

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 51%

Contextual conditioning during free-operant extinction: Unsignaled, signaled, and backward-signaled noncontingent food

Baker

1990

Animal Learning & Behavior

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“…Because the levers had not been present before, there was no history of discriminative control of lever pressing. Therefore, the increased rate of lever presses can hardly be classified as a discriminative function of the stimuli, which would have confounded the role of the S+ as a reinforcer (e.g., Melching, 1954). Other researchers have reported an increase in the overall responding, described as a general motivating effect (e.g., Donahoe & Wessels, 1980).…”

Section: Blocking Of Conditioned Reinforcementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Blocking of Stimulus Control and Conditioned Reinforcement

2020

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Stimuli with no specific biological relevance for the organism can acquire multiple functions through conditioning procedures. Conditioning procedures involving compound stimuli sometimes result in blocking, related to the phenomenon of overshadowing. This can affect the establishment of conditioned stimuli in classical conditioning and discriminative stimuli in operant conditioning. The aim of the current experiment was to investigate whether a standard blocking procedure might block the establishment of a conditioned reinforcer-in addition to blocking discriminative control by that stimulus in rats. We used successive discrimination training to establish a tone or a light as a discriminative stimulus for chain pulling, upon which an unconditioned reinforcer (water) was contingent. Next, we trained a tone-light compound stimulus the same way. Finally, we conducted two tests, one for stimulus control and one for a conditioned reinforcing effect on a new response. Little or no discriminative control was evident by the second stimulus, which was added to the previously established discriminative stimulus later during training. The subsequent test showed blocking of conditioned reinforcement in five of the seven rats. Procedures that generate blocking can have a practical impact on attempts to establish discriminative stimuli and/or conditioned reinforcers in applied settings and needs careful attention.

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“…The secondary reinforcer appears to be equally effective in children and adults, since the percentages of correct responses are similar for the Sr groups in three experiments, the present one, that of Hubbard (4), and that of Fort, Myers, and Myers (3). The most parsimonious explanation for this consistently high performance of secondary rewarded Ss in discrimination tasks would seem to lie in some form of a discrimination hypothesis (I, 5,7,8). This hypothesis assumes that secondary reinforcers increase the similarity of extinction and training trials and thus retard the S's recognition that the situation has changed.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%