Different Types Of Reinforcement Research Articles

The reinforcers for drug abuse: Why people take drugs

Drug-abuse behavior may be maintained by reinforcement of the following types: (1) primary positive; (2) primary negative (a) by termination of withdrawal; (b) by reducing attention to, or discrimination of, aversive stimuli); (3) secondary positive (a) social and unrelated to drug effects; (b) social and related to drug effects; (c) chaining; and (4) secondary negative. Which type of reinforcement functions to maintain drug-abuse behavior appears to depend partly upon the class of drugs employed. The following drug classes are discussed in terms of the reinforcers maintaining their abuse: narcotics, stimulants, sedative-hypnotics and alcohol, hallucinogens and marijuana, and placebo. Different treatment modalities are aimed at different types of reinforcement. Using narcotic abuse as an example, methadone maintenance, detoxification, and traditional psychotherapy are discussed in terms of their effect on each of the types of reinforcement maintaining the drug habit.

The Effects of Different Types of Reinforcement on Young Children's Incidental Learning

The Effects of Different Types of Reinforcement on Young Children's Incidental Learning

Size and reliability of frequency-difference thresholds determined with operant tracking procedure.

Auditory frequency discrimination thresholds have been determined by a "tracking procedure" at five frequencies and two intensity levels for a group of four cats. Intra-animal thresholds were found to be quite stable, and there was good inter-animal agreement among three of the four cats. Although quite stable, the tracking thresholds were larger than those which had been obtained using an avoidance procedure. However, because of the several differences between the tracking procedure and avoidance conditioning procedure, no conclusions can be drawn concerning the efficacy of the different types of reinforcement in determining the ultimate limit of the animals' discrimination ability.

DISCRIMINATION LEARNING IN CHILDREN AS A FUNCTION OF REINFORCEMENT VALUE

The present study is concerned with the influence of reinforcement value on learning. Reinforcement value is defined as the individual S's relative preference for various types of reinforcers, when amount of reinforcement and probability of occurrence of reinforcement are held constant.2 The results of several studies show that, on the average, different types of reinforcers are differentially effective for learning (1, 5). For example, Terrell and Kennedy found that children learn faster when rewarded with candy rather than with praise (5). However, despite the fact that children as a group learn more effectively on candy reinforcement, it is hardly conceivable that any one type and amount of reinforcement has an exactly equal reinforcing effect for all Ss of any such group. Given one group of Ss and one type of reinforcement, there must still be some intragroup variability in effectiveness of that reinforcement as a function of variability in value of the reinforcer for the Ss. In other words, for different people, the same objective or external reinforcer may have different reinforcement values, and if so, the within-group variability in reinforcement value should be reflected statistically as a large standard deviation in number of trials to learning criterion. The present experiment used a discrimination learning situation to compare the relative effects of two experimental treatments: identity of reinforcement value vs. identity of external reinforcing object. Ss run under the first condition (group RV) were allowed to choose the most preferred one of three reinforcers: M & M candies, varicolored marbles, or varicolored plastic trinkets. Ss of the second experimental group (group R) were 1 The authors wish to express their thanks and gratitude for the cooperation and assist