Consider virtually everyone’s typical reaction to a vending machine that fails to deliver the selected goods. You put in your money, push the button for your selection, and wait. Something is supposed to happen. The machine is supposed to deliver your goods, every time, on a continuous reinforcement schedule.
In many of our examples of reinforcement in past columns, we often dealt with reinforcers that occurred after each response. This gives us the simplest reinforcement schedule. Occasionally we pointed out that reinforcers could occur after only some responses rather than after all responses. We only rarely added this increased complexity, because we had not focused on it much.
In this column we get to consider another example of shaping, one in which people and pigeons actually shape each other’s behavior. This time the criteria, regarding which responses get reinforced, change after each reinforcement as the “shapee’s” behavior also shapes the “shaper’s” behavior.
The words preclusion, extinction, and forgetting refer to different processes or procedures. Preclusion differs from extinction in a way similar to forgetting. While forgetting is a process, and extinction can be either a process or a procedure, preclusion is an intervention procedure that can help solve some types of behavior problems.
While the process of generalization enlarges the set of evocative stimulus relations, the process of evocation shrinks the set of evocative stimulus relations. The evocation process often reduces the number of stimuli that evoke the response of concern while making the remaining evocative stimuli more effective. Let’s consider to what these terms refer.
The contingencies in respondent and operant behavior and conditioning form the foundation for effective understanding, prediction, control, and interpretation of our behavior. Helping us in these endeavors is the elicit/evoke distinction.
The general approach to accounting for behavioral events proceeds, in its simplest form, by first analyzing the antecedent events, the ones occurring before the behavior of concern. One looks for any functional relations with the subsequent occurrence of the behavior of concern. Then, if appropriate, a next step involves analyzing the postcedent events, the ones occurring after the behavior of concern. Now one looks for any functional relations with any further subsequent occurrences of the behavior of concern.
Consider the common explanation that some change in behavior occurred out of “boredom.” We often hear this in the complaint form, “I’m bored,” although no inner agent, “I,” is available to “be” bored. The complaint could be, but usually is not, a verbal shortcut. Two words could stand in for over a dozen. “I’m bored” could replace a report that “the amount of reinforcement for current behavior has become too small to maintain the behavior,” so it is extinguishing (that is, undergoing a decrease in occurrences that may reach zero).
Consequences divide into various types that we detail later. Our concern just now is their status as either “reinforcing” or “punishing” consequences, because this characteristic pertains to the central role of consequences. This central role involves consequences either making responses occur more often, in which case the consequence earns the title “reinforcer,” or making responses occur less often, in which case the consequence earns the title “punisher.”
