Foreword by Norbert Hornstein Preface Part I 1 Mind and Body 2 Structures, Capacities, and Conventions 3 Knowledge of Grammar 4 Some Elements of Grammar Part II 5 On the Biological Basis of Language Capacities 6 Language and Unconscious Knowledge Notes Index

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/BB96E4E09C461EFC230F72A9D7BDF603/S0140525X00001515a.pdf/div-class-title-rules-and-representations-div.pdf

Rules and Representations

Scalar expectancy theory and Weber's law in animal timing.

Behavioral decision theory: processes of judgment and choice

Dopamine reward circuitry: two projection systems from the ventral midbrain to the nucleus accumbens-olfactory tubercle complex.

SUMMARY How are humans' subjective judgments of contingencies related to objective contingencies? Work in social psychology and human contingency learning predicts that the greater the frequency of desired outcomes, the greater people's judgments of contingency will be. Second, the learned helplessness theory of depression provides both a strong and a weak prediction concerning the linkage between subjective and objective contingencies. According to the strong prediction, depressed individuals should underestimate the degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes relative to the objective degree of contingency. According to the weak prediction, depressed individuals merely should judge that there is a smaller degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes than nondepressed individuals should. In addition, the present investigation deduced a new strong prediction from the helplessness theory: Nondepressed individuals should overestimate the degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes relative to the objective degree of contingency. In the experiments, depressed and nondepressed students were presented with one of a series of problems varying in the actual degree of contingency. In each problem, subjects estimated the degree of contingency between their responses (pressing or not pressing a button) and an environmental outcome (onset of a green light). Performance on a behavioral task and estimates of the conditional probability of green light onset associated with the two response alternatives provided additional measures for assessing beliefs about contingencies. Depressed students' judgments of contingency were surprisingly accurate in all four experiments. Nondepressed students, on the other hand, overestimated the degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes when noncontingent outcomes were frequent and/or desired and underestimated the degree of contingency when contingent outcomes were undesired. Thus, predictions derived from social psychology concerning the linkage between subjective and objective contingencies were confirmed for nondepressed students but not for depressed students. Further, the predictions of helplessness theory received, at best, minimal support. The learned helplessness and self-serving motivational bias hypotheses are evaluated as explanations of the results. In addition, parallels are drawn between the present results and phenomena in cognitive psychology, social psychology, and animal learning. Finally, implications for cognitive illusions in normal people, appetitive helplessness, judgment of contingency between stimuli, and learning theory are discussed.

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Judgment of contingency in depressed and nondepressed students: sadder but wiser?

Replication and extension of Skinner's "superstition" experiment showed the development of two kinds of behavior at asymptote: interim activities (related to adjunctive behavior) occurred just after food delivery; the terminal response (a discriminated operant) occurred toward the end of the interval and continued until food delivery. These data suggest a view of operant conditioning (the terminal response) in terms of two sets of principles: principles of behavioral variation that describe the origins of behavior "appropriate" to a situation, in advance of reinforcement; and principles of reinforcement that describe the selective elimination of behavior so produced. This approach was supported by (a) an account of the parallels between the Law of Effect and evolution by means of natural selection, (fc) its ability to shed light on persistent problems in learning (e.g., continuity vs. noncontinuity, variability associated with extinction, the relationship between classical and instrumental conditioning, the controversy between behaviorist and cognitive approaches to learning), and (c) its ability to deal with a number of recent anomalies in the learning literature ("instinctive drift," auto-shaping, and auto-maintenance). The interim activities were interpreted in terms of interactions among motivational systems, and this view was supported by a review of the literature on adjunctive behavior and by comparison with similar phenomena in ethology (displacement, redirection, and "vacuum" activities). The proposed theoretical scheme represents a shift away from hypothetical "laws of learning" toward an interpretation of behavioral change in terms of interaction and competition among tendencies to action according to principles evolved in phylogeny.

Virginia L. Simmelhag

Papers

The "supersitition" experiment: A reexamination of its implications for the principles of adaptive behavior.