The Limbic System and Behavioral Reinforcement

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on the limbic system and behavioral reinforcement. The chapter discusses the experiments in which patterns of neural activity were recorded from the brain during periods of “quiet waking” by means of implanted microelectrodes. Patterns that occurred rarely at the outset were “conditioned” to occur more frequently by methods of operant conditioning. Afterwards, these conditioned brain responses were brought under control of “discriminative” stimuli so that periods of operant neural behavior could be alternated with control periods at the will of the experimenter. This permitted observation of the neural and behavioral concomitants of these neural responses occurred as components of voluntary behaviors. Because the neurons involved in any particular pattern of voluntary behavior might be hard to find in the course of normal microelectrode explorations, a method was adopted to circumvent the difficulty. To assure that a neuron under study would be involved in the final voluntary pattern, a neural discharge pattern itself was chosen as the “behavior” to be reinforced in a conditioning experiment.