Discriminative control of choice by reinforcers in children and adults

IF 1.4 3区心理学 Q4 BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior Pub Date : 2025-06-30 DOI:10.1002/jeab.70024

Corina Jimenez-Gomez, Carolyn M. Ritchey, Adam T. Brewer, Sarah Cowie, Christopher A. Podlesnik

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Research with nonhumans and human children has questioned the notion of the strengthening properties of reinforcers when choices are controlled by what reinforcers signal about upcoming events. We extended this work by developing and evaluating an automated task to evaluate the discriminative versus strengthening effects of reinforcers with two children of typical development (Experiment 1) and 18 university students (Experiments 2 and 3). Participants responded by touching one of two concurrently available images on a touchscreen. Across conditions, the probability that the next reinforcer would be delivered at the same location as the immediately preceding reinforced response varied with probabilities of .10 (switch), .50 (control), and .90 (stay). Both children and students responded according to the arranged reinforcer probabilities of the next reinforcer instead of where the most recent reinforcer had been delivered. The present findings add to the body of work suggesting that reinforcers serve a discriminative function, and we use a quantitative model of reinforcer misallocation to account for choices being imperfectly controlled by contingencies.

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儿童和成人强化物的选择性控制

对非人类和人类儿童的研究对强化物的强化特性的概念提出了质疑，当选择受到强化物对即将发生的事件的信号的控制时。我们扩展了这项工作，开发并评估了一个自动化任务，以评估强化物的区别与强化效应，其中包括两名典型发展儿童（实验1）和18名大学生（实验2和3）。参与者的反应是触摸触摸屏上两个同时可用的图像中的一个。在不同的条件下，下一个强化反应与前一个强化反应在同一位置被传递的概率分别为0.10（切换）、0.50（控制）和0.90（停留）。儿童和学生都根据下一个强化物的强化物概率做出反应，而不是根据最近的强化物被传递到哪里。目前的研究结果进一步表明，强化物具有判别功能，我们使用强化物错配的定量模型来解释偶然性对选择的不完全控制。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior 医学-行为科学

CiteScore

3.90

自引率

14.80%

发文量

审稿时长

>12 weeks

期刊介绍： Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior is primarily for the original publication of experiments relevant to the behavior of individual organisms.