Barba's (2012) paper is a serious and thoughtful analysis of a vexing problem in behavior analysis: Just what should count as an operant class and how do people know? The slippery issue of a "generalized operant" or functional response class illustrates one aspect of this problem, and "variation" or "novelty" as an operant appears to fall into…

Serving as Rachlin's teaching assistant for his graduate course on animal learning in 1973 determined the direction of the author's career, which has been to build computer models and robots based mostly on the equations from that course and related ones. These artificial beings behave and learn very much like animals, and creating them forces a…

We quantified the effect of first experience on behavior in operant learning and studied its underlying computational principles. To that goal, we analyzed more than 200,000 choices in a repeated-choice experiment. We found that the outcome of the first experience has a substantial and lasting effect on participants' subsequent behavior, which we…

Recent studies have demonstrated that the expectation of reward delivery has an inverse relationship with operant behavioral variation (e.g., Stahlman, Roberts, & Blaisdell, 2010). Research thus far has largely focused on one aspect of reinforcement--the likelihood of food delivery. In two experiments with pigeons, we examined the effect of two…

We used giant African pouched rats ("Cricetomys gambianus") as land mine-detection animals in Mozambique because they have an excellent sense of smell, weigh too little to activate mines, and are native to sub-Saharan Africa, and therefore are resistant to local parasites and diseases. In 2009 the rats searched 93,400 m[superscript 2] of…

When given to pigeons, the direct-acting dopamine agonist apomorphine elicits pecking. The response has been likened to foraging pecking because it bears remarkable similarity to foraging behavior, and it is enhanced by food deprivation. On the other hand, other data suggest the response is not related to foraging behavior and may even interfere…

A multimedia-based learning system to teach children with intellectual disabilities (ID) the basic living and science concepts is proposed. The tutorials' development is pedagogically based on Mayer's Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning combined with Skinner's Operant Conditioning Model. Two types of tutorials are proposed. In the first type;…

We examined the preference of undergraduate students for a live or a virtual rat when learning about concepts of operant conditioning. Students were provided with the opportunity to directly compare a virtual and a live rat in a supplemental exercise for Learning courses. We argue that the design of teaching exercises should involve a systematic…

In three experiments, human participants pressed the space bar on a computer keyboard to earn points on random-ratio (RR) and random-interval (RI) schedules of reinforcement. Verbalized contingency awareness (CA) for each schedule was measured after the entire task (Experiments 1 and 2), or after each RR-RI trial (Experiment 3). In all three…

Dissociating motoric and motivational effects of pharmacological manipulations on operant behavior is a substantial challenge. To address this problem, we applied a response-bout analysis to data from rats trained to lever press for sucrose on variable-interval (VI) schedules of reinforcement. Motoric, motivational, and schedule factors (effort…

We used giant African pouched rats ("Cricetomys gambianus") as land mine-detection animals in Mozambique because they have an excellent sense of smell, weigh too little to activate mines, and are native to sub-Saharan Africa, and therefore are resistant to local parasites and diseases. In 2009 the rats searched 93,400 m[superscript 2] of…

Attention deficit disorders are among the most prevalent and widely studied of all psychiatric disorders. The National Center for Health Statistics reports that 9.0% of children (12.3% of boys and 5.5% of girls) between ages 5 to 17 have been diagnosed with ADHD. Research consistently demonstrates that attention deficits have a deleterious effect…

In Experiment 1, 4 pigeons were trained on a multiple chain schedule in which the initial link was a variable-interval (VI) 20-s schedule signalled by a red or green center key, and terminal links required four responses made to the left (L) and/or right (R) keys. In the REPEAT component, signalled by red keylights, only LRLR terminal-link…

Action-outcome contingencies can be learnt either by active trial-and-error, or vicariously, by observing the outcomes of actions performed by others. The extant literature is ambiguous as to which of these modes of learning is more effective, as controlled comparisons of operant and observational learning are rare. Here, we contrasted human…

While knowing what to expect is important, it is equally important to know when to expect it and to respond accordingly. This is apparent even in simple Pavlovian training situations in which animals learn to respond more strongly closer to reward delivery. Here we report that the nucleus accumbens core, an area well-positioned to represent…