Inducing Maximal Versus Typical Learning Through the Provision of a Pretraining Goal Orientation

This study explores how account managers—employees who operate as entrepreneurial customer boundary spanners—obtain intrafirm knowledge (organizational and expertise knowledge) from diverse colleagues so as to develop tailor-made solutions for their customers. Access to intrafirm knowledge is obtained through two independent knowledge-based exchanges within internal knowledge markets: account managers invest in different activities in order to signal communal and deal-maker reputations. In exchange, colleagues share organizational and expertise knowledge that ultimately contribute to account managers' performance. The types of knowledge shared by colleagues depend on the reputations of account managers.     

The Effects of Flavor-Aversion Learning on Instrumental Performance

Two experiments investigated the role of lithium-mediated environmental conditioning on instrumental performance. Experiment 1 demonstrated that a novel taste consumed in one arm of a T maze prior to lithium-induced toxicosis reduced performance in this environment whereas similar aversions conditioned in the home cage failed to alter maze performance. Experiment 2 showed that maze performance in a straight alleyway was decremented during extinction only in a group that actually traversed the alley prior to drinking saccharin and receiving lithium injections. This demonstrated that the instrumental decrement observed in Experiment 1 was due not only to the presence of an unpalatable flavor in the goalbox during the test.

     

Magic Learning Pill: Ontological and Instrumental Learning in Order to Speed Up Education

The purpose of this research is to investigate the phenomenology of learning — people”s attitudes toward their learning experiences that have inherent worth in themselves (i.e., ontological learning) or have value outside of the learning itself (i.e., instrumental learning). In order to explore this topic, 58 participants from the U.S., Russia, and Brazil were interviewed with a central question derived from the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov’s short story “Profession”: whether participants would take a “Magic Learning Pill” (MLP) to avoid the process of learning, and instead magically acquire the knowledge. The MLP would guarantee the immediate learning by skipping the process of learning while achieving the same effect of gaining skills and knowledge. Almost all participants could think of some learning experiences for which they would take MLP and others for which they would not. Many participants would not take MLP for ontological learning, which is learning experiences that have inherent value for the people, while they would take MLP for instrumental learning, which is learning that mainly serves some other non-educational purposes. The main finding suggests that both instrumental and ontological types of learning are recognized by a wide range of people from diverse cultures as present and valued in their lives. This is especially significant in light of the overwhelmingly instrumental tone of public discourse about education. In the context of formal education, ontological learning was mentioned 35 times (28.0%) while instrumental learning was mentioned 74 times (60.2%). Although ontological learning was often mentioned as taking place outside of school, incorporating pedagogy supporting ontological learning at school deserves consideration.     

Reference Points and Omission Bias

Subjects were asked to evaluate the choice of options leading to known outcomes, or to say how they would feel about a chance outcome, in hypothetical decisions. We independently manipulated the value of the status quo and the assignment of the better or worse outcome to an act or an omission. Acts leading to the worse outcome were always considered worse than omissions leading to the worse outcome. This act-omission difference was reduced or reversed for the better outcome. Most experiments showed an overall bias toward omissions (combining better and worse). Little evidence was found for greater omission bias for losses relative to the status quo than for gains. A bias toward maintaining the status quo itself was found, however, independently of omission bias. Most of the results can be explained by norm theory and by loss aversion, but other possible accounts are inconsistent with the results.     

Instrumental Robots

Science and Engineering Ethics - Advances in artificial intelligence research allow us to build fairly sophisticated agents: robots and computer programs capable of acting and deciding on their own...     

Instrumental Rationality

Does rationality require us to take the means to our ends? Intuitively, it seems clear that it does. And yet it has proven difficult to explain why this should be so: after all, if one is pursuing an end that one has decisive reason not to pursue, the balance of reasons will presumably speak against one's taking the means necessary to bring that end about. In this paper I propose a novel account of the instrumental requirement which addresses this problem. On the view I develop, the instrumental requirement is normative not because agents have reasons to comply with it, but because it is a normative standard intrinsic to intentional action—i.e., it is a standard that partly spells out what it is to exercise one's agency well.     

Instrumental to Pavlovian transfer: Learning about response-reinforcer contingencies affects subsequent learning about stimulus-reinforcer contingencies

Two experiments examined the interaction between response-reinforcer (R-S) and stimulus-reinforcer (S-S) learning. In both experiments, three groups of rats were exposed to escapable, yoked inescapable, or no shocks. All groups were then exposed to either two or four sessions of truly random control (TRC) conditioning (Experiment 1) or to an excitatory conditioning procedure (Experiment 2) in which the shock US occurred with either moderate or low probability. Excitatory strength of the CS was assessed during extinction by a conditioned emotional response (CER) test. Inescapably shocked rats conditioned less than did their escapably shocked and nonshocked partners under all TRC conditions of Experiment 1, but only conditioned less than their partners in Experiment 2 when exposed to the moderate CS-US contingency for four sessions. These results provide a clear demonstration of transfer between instrumental training and Pavlovian excitatory conditioning and thus, support the influence of learning about R-S contingencies upon subsequent learning about S-S contingencies. Both a contextual blocking interpretation and an expansion of the learned helplessness theory were discussed as possible explanations of this transfer.     

Bidirectional Instrumental Conditioning

Three experiments examined bidirectional instrumental conditioning by training hungry rats to push a pole in one direction for food pellets and in the other for either a sugar or a starch solution. In the first study we examined whether the animals learned about the actionreinforcer relations using a specific satiety procedure. Prefeeding one type of reinforcer before an extinction test selectively depressed the performance of the action that had been paired with this reinforcer during training. The second experiment investigated the sensitivity of the bidirectional actions to variations in the action-reinforcer contingencies. When the instrumental contingency was degraded by presenting unpaired reinforcers, the animals pushed less in the direction that was paired with the reinforcer type that was the same as the non-contiguous one. A third study revealed that increasing the rate of reinforcement for one action enhanced its rate of performance without significantly affecting the performance of the other action. We conclude that the effects of reinforcer devaluation, the action-outcome contingency, and the rate of reinforcement are not mediated by Pavlovian associations between the manipulandum and the reinforcer.     

Explaining the Instrumental Principle

The Wide-Scope view of instrumental reason holds that you should not intend an end without also intending what you believe to be the necessary means. This, the Wide-Scoper claims, provides the best account of why failing to intend the believed means to your end is a rational failing. But Wide-Scopers have struggled to meet a simple Explanatory Challenge: why shouldn't you intend an end without intending the necessary means? What reason is there not to do so? In the first half of this paper, I argue that the Wide-Scope view struggles to meet this challenge because it takes the principles of instrumental reason to have unlimited application—to apply to all agents, in all circumstances. I then go on to offer a new account of these principles. The new account is very much in the spirit of the Wide-Scope view, and shares its central advantages, but lacks its unlimited application. This view should, therefore, find the Explanatory Challenge more tractable. In the second half of the paper, I argue that this prediction is confirmed. If the requirements of instrumental reason apply only when a means is, or is believed to be, necessary for your end, then plausible independent claims, about reasons, rationality, and intentions, explain why failing to intend the necessary means to your ends is a rational failing.     

The Effects of Type and Amount of Pretraining on Transfer in Concept Formation

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of 2 types of directed attention pretraining, a form of stimulus predifferentiation, on immediate- and delayed-transfer tasks in concept identification. In both experiments, the participants received either the “seeing-and-discriminating” or “seeing” technique of pretraining, except for those assigned to the control group. The participants received different amounts of pretraining. In the first experiment, participants were required to learn new concepts from the same category for the delayed-transfer task, whereas in the second experiment, the delayed-transfer task involved concepts from a different category. Among the major findings in both experiments are that the pretraining methods resulted in positive transfer on all transfer tasks. In general, the seeing-and-discriminating method yielded a more positive transfer than the seeing technique. Maximal positive transfer effects were found with a small number of trials. The implications of the findings for understanding the effectiveness of various training methods used for problem solving are discussed.