Conflicting approaches: operant psychology arrives at a primate laboratory

During a brief period, from 1955 to 1957, behavior analysts, primarily Charles Ferster, Roger Kelleher, and John Falk, conducted research on chimpanzees at the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology in Orange Park, Florida. This was a time of conflict between operant conditioners and more traditional experimental psychologists at the national level, and there was a similar conflict at the local level in Orange Park. The principal overt issues concerned the use of deprivation procedures, the apparatus utilized, and the naming of animals, although more fundamental differences probably set the occasion for the disputes. The conflicts in Orange Park can be seen as a microcosm of the broader conflicts that occurred during a period when the operant approach was being extended and applied more broadly than before.     

Controlling pain reports through operant conditioning: a laboratory demonstration

Operant conditioning of pain reports was studied in two laboratory experiments. In the first one 5 subjects were given the same pain stimulus on 15 trials and their recorded pain ratings gave no systemic trends across subjects. 8 other subjects received the same pain tests but on some of the trials increases or decreases in pain ratings were verbally reinforced while the noxious stimulus was held constant across trials. Clear and significant differences between reinforced increases and decreases in pain reports were observed. In Exp. 2, 5 subjects were given neutral feedback and systematically decreasing levels of noxious stimulation, resulting in a good correlation between pain ratings and stimulation level. 5 subjects were provided reinforcement for increasing pain reports while the pain stimulus was systematically reduced. Increases in pain reports were observed simultaneously with large decreases in the level of the noxious stimulus. Results of these experiments support the operant conception of pain.     

Expansions on a computerized operant laboratory: Considerations for combining teaching and research

The present laboratory configuration addresses concerns beyond the functional workings of a computerized research system to include human factors. The logistical aspects of error-free multi-operator operations are discussed along with the economics of developing, assembling, and maintaining the stations. The actual configurations (hardware and software) of the present laboratory are explained and discussed, as are the philosophies and experiences that led to a highly successful combined research and teaching operant laboratory.     

Say something nice: A meta-analytic review of peer reporting interventions

Peer reporting interventions (i.e., Positive Peer Reporting and tootling) are commonly used peer-mediated interventions in schools. These interventions involve training students to make reports about peers' prosocial behaviors, whether in oral or written form. Although peer reporting interventions have been included in meta-analyses of group contingencies, this study is the first meta-analytic review of single-case research focusing exclusively on peer reporting interventions. The literature search and application of inclusion criteria yielded 21 studies examining the impact of a peer reporting intervention on student behavior compared to baseline conditions. All studies used single-case experimental designs including at least three demonstrations of an effect and at least three data points per phase. Several aspects of studies, participants, and interventions were coded. Log response ratios and Tau were calculated as effect size estimates. Effect size estimates were synthesized in a multi-level meta-analysis with random effects for (a) studies and (b) cases within studies. Overall results indicated peer reporting interventions had a non-zero and positive impact on student outcomes. This was also true when data were subset by outcome (i.e., disruptive behavior, academically engaged behavior, and social behavior). Results were suggestive of more between- than within-study variability. Moderator analyses were conducted to identify aspects of studies, participants, or peer reporting interventions associated with differential effectiveness. Moderator analyses suggested published studies were associated with higher effect sizes than unpublished studies (i.e., theses/dissertations). This meta-analysis suggests peer reporting interventions are effective in improving student behavior compared to baseline conditions. Implications and directions for future investigation are discussed.     

Social reinforcement of operant behavior in rats: a methodological note.

An apparatus was developed to study social reinforcement in the rat. Four Long-Evans female rats were trained to press a lever via shaping, with the reinforcer being access to a castrated male rat. Responding under a fixed-ratio schedule and in extinction was also observed. Social access was found to be an effective reinforcer. When social reinforcement was compared with food reinforcement under similar conditions of deprivation and reinforcer duration, no significant differences were observed.     

Colony aggression in laboratory rats: A review and some recommendations

The behavioral response of established colonies of domesticated rats to the presence of an unfamiliar intruder of the same species represents one of the most effective procedures yet developed to study aggression in the laboratory. Here, the social, experiential, and environmental variables that influence attack severity are reviewed and several important methodological issues are discussed. Brief exposures of intruders to intact colonies may produce misleading results but long-term test sessions increase the likelihood that intruders will be either killed or severely injured. We describe a simple modification of the colony-intruder procedure whereby intruders can successfully defend themselves during long sessions and thus reduce serious injury. The modified procedure appears to conform more closely to what happens during aggressive encounters in free-living populations of wild rats.     

Performance of rats on a discrimination operant alley task discriminated

An automated discriminated operant alley apparatus is described. Data from four rat strains indicate that the light-dark choice is learned by both pigmented and albino rats. The task requires a minimum of experimenter time and allows initial acquisition to be recorded without the interference of a shaping procedure.     

Psycholinguistics discovers the operant: a review of Roger Brown's A first language: the early stages

Brown's book is selectively reviewed with the aim of noting points of similarity between Brown's psycholinguistic analysis of language acquisition and a functional analysis of verbal behavior. Brown divides early language acquisition into five stages, based on mean length of utterance in samples of child speech. His book concentrates on Stage I, when mean length of utterance first rises above 1.0, indicating that children are beginning to speak in multi-morphemic utterances, and Stage II, when mean length of utterance in morphemes is about 2.25. Multi-morphemic utterances in Stage I consist mainly of ordered sequences of uninflected nouns and verbs, the order being that of the simple declarative sentence (agent-action-indirect object-direct object-locative). The review attempts a theoretical analysis of the functional stimulus control of Stage I syntactic order, concluding that the control must originate partly in relations among events in the environment and partly in covert autoclitic verbal behavior. Increases in mean length of utterance in Stage II are mainly due to the appearance of several “grammatical morphemes” such as the progressive -ing inflection on verbs and the plural -s inflection on nouns. The review attempts a behavioral paraphrase, again in terms of tacts and autoclitics, of Brown's psycholinguistic analysis of grammatical morphemes, concluding that Stage II displays the further development, building on Stage I, of the combined control of verbal behavior by relations in the environment and covert self-generated verbal stimuli. Similarities between Brown's psycholinguistic analysis and a functional analysis of language acquisition suggest that the two viewpoints are converging on a common concern with the stimulus control of verbal behavior.     

Cerebellar-induced apraxic agraphia: a review and three new cases

Apraxic agraphia is a writing disorder due to a loss or lack of access to motor engrams that program the movements necessary to produce letters. Clinical and functional neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that the neural network responsible for writing includes the superior parietal region and the dorsolateral and medial premotor cortex. Recent studies of two cases with atypical lesion localisations in the left thalamus and the right cerebellum support the hypothesis that the written language network is larger than previously assumed. The aim of this study is twofold: (1) to provide a survey of cases of apraxic agraphia published between 1973 and June 2010, and (2) to provide further evidence for a role of the cerebellum in writing via three additional cases who presented with apraxic agraphia after ischemic damage in the cerebellum. Functional neuroimaging studies by means of brain perfusion SPECT showed perfusional deficits in the anatomoclinically suspected supratentorial areas, subserving language dynamics, syntax, naming, writing and executive functioning.     

Experiments on neophobia in wild and laboratory rats: a reevaluation.

Two experiments using food-container avoidance as an index of neophobia are reported for two strains of laboratory and one strain of wild rats. In Experiment 1 rats were fed from a single familiar container until their consumption had stabilized. Upon replacing the familiar container with a novel container, the latency of all three strains to begin feeding increased. In Experiment 2 rats were offered a choice between a familiar and a novel container containing identical food. Though there was considerable individual variation among the three strains, the wild strain was more reluctant to eat from the novel container than a hooded laboratory strain, which, in turn, was nore reluctant than an albino laboratory strain. Nonetheless, all three strains showed an initial avoidance of the novel container. It was concluded that both wild and laboratory strains are neophobic and that strain differences are ones of degree, not of kind.     

Forgetting of an operant response: Physostigmine-produced increases in escape latency in rats as a function of time of injection

Latency of a fixed ratio (FR) 3 escape response in rats was found to be a U-shaped function of the interval between training and injection of the anticholinesterase drug physostigmine, for intervals from 30 min. to 5 days between training and injection. An increase in FR 3 escape latency was found at 28 days. FR 1 escape groups produced a latency curve of a shape similar to that of the FR 3 group. These data confirm the results of earlier experiments using a different training procedure, and a different response measure. These results are consistent with the theory that the physiological correlate of rat memory lies in synaptic change.     

Time horizons in rats: the effect of operant control of access to future food.

The primary goal of this experiment was to determine whether the addition of an operant requirement for access to a less costly (continuous reinforcement) patch of future food increased the time horizon over which that future patch decreased intake in a currently available depleting (progressive-ratio) patch. Three groups of 4 rats were tested. Each member of the earned-time group was required to cumulate a fixed-time outside the progressive-ratio patch to obtain access to food in the less costly patch; the fixed-time requirement ranged from 2 to 64 min. Rats in the matched-time group received response-independent access to less costly food at the average delay shown by the earned-time group. Rats in the matched-time no-food group were removed from the chamber at the same average delay without receiving access to less costly food. Two of the earned-time rats showed an increased time horizon relative to that shown by the matched-time rats (approaching 40 min for 1 rat). The other 2 earned-time rats markedly increased instrumental responding but showed suppression of intake only when food was less than 20 min away. The matched-time group showed less suppression of intake over a similar range of delay intervals. Surprisingly, the matched-time no-food animals also showed suppression of intake concentrated at the end of the session, possibly reflecting the receipt of their entire daily ration 30 min after the session. The potential importance of time horizons to the foraging process is clear, but experimenters are still working out paradigms for investigation of these horizons.