In these pages ...

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

Introduction to Special Issue: A Creative Collaboration

The Psychological Record -     

In these pages ...

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

Stochastic transitivity and the unidimensional control of choice

A concurrent-chains paradigm was used to test three models of preference for schedules of reinforcement. Each model assumes choice to be a monotonic function of values on a single dimension (“simple scalability”). For choices involving variable-interval and fixed-interval schedules, this dimension is assumed to be an harmonic average of the interreinforcement intervals; for choices involving fixedinterval and fixed-ratio schedules, the dimension is the time to reinforcement irrespective of response rate; for choices involving different combinations of rate and duration of reinforcement, the dimension is the rate of “reinforcement-time”, or the product of the two parameters. Each model implies a strong form of transitivity (“functional equivalence”), which held for half the subjects (that half exclusively sensitive to the reinforcement variable specified by the model). An alternative unidimensional model which implies a weaker form of transitivity (“weak binary utility model”) was consistent with the preferences of all subjects. This model states that a single factor controls the direction of preferences but not necessarily the exact choice probability, as simple scalability assumes.