Abstract
Effective conditioning requires a correlation between the experimenter's definition of a response and an organism's, but an animal's perception of its behavior differs from ours. Various definitions of the response are explored experimentally using the slopes of learning curves to infer which comes closest to the organism's definition. The resulting exponentially weighted moving average provides a model of memory which grounds a quantitative theory of reinforcement in which incentives excite behavior and focus the excitement on the responses present in memory at the same time. The correlation between the organism's memory and the behavior measured by the experimenter is given by coupling coefficients derived for various schedules of reinforcement. For simple schedules these coefficients can be concatenated to predict the effects of complex schedules and can be inserted into a generic model of arousal and temporal constraint to predict response rates under any scheduling arrangement. According to the theory, the decay of memory is response-indexed rather than time-indexed. Incentives displace memory for the responses that occur before them and may truncate the representation of the response that brings them about. This contiguity-weighted correlation model bridges opposing views of the reinforcement process and can be extended in a straightforward way to the classical conditioning of stimuli. Placing the short-term memory of behavior in so central a role provides a behavioral account of a key cognitive process.
On Thursday January 14, I was attending ultimate frisbee class at 11:00 am. During class we work on skills and light conditioning. After class a pick-up game ensues and on this day a 10 people stayed after class and played a game to 5 points. The game went back and fourth until the game was tied at 4 to 4. I was exhausted by this point in the game and knew I had one good burst of energy left. My team was on offense and the disc was tapped in(play ensues). After I performed a juke move I was able to gain a step on my defender so I decided to go long for hopes of a touchdown. My teammate also saw this and threw the disc with right to left trajectory to the left side of the end zone. With my defender behind me I ran to the area where the disc was heading and I knew I would have to dive in order to make the completion. I dove and caught the disc and the game was over but not before I received floor burns on my leg and back from the game ending dive. As a result of the game winning touchdown I will probably do it again because it was reinforced.