Dynamic Models of Reconditioning

Arizona State University-Tempe Campus, Tempe AZ

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Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): These experiments and correlated theoretical development will measure changes in the probability of responding over thousands of trials using continual conditioning and extinction paradigms (autoshaping and negative automaintenance). These paradigms pit Pavlovian conditioning of approach against instrumental contingencies that discourage approach. Trial durations and the first and second moments of the intertrial interval and probability of reinforcement will be varied. The relative likelihood of existing models of conditioning and extinction will be compared in light of the data. These differ from traditional experiments in that the degrees of freedom in the data will vastly outnumber the degrees of freedom in the models. Other experiments will vary attention to the CS and background using reinforcement contingencies, to bridge a theory of schedule control to associative conditioning. In other experiments the context will be localized and presented in trace and delay paradigms to test a model of blocking-by and protecting-of context. A general theory of the control of target responses by concurrent and forthcoming incentives will be developed to unify the findings. This proposal will: (a) Provide a new test bed for models of associative conditioning; (b) develop analytic techniques to extract orders of magnitude more information from select experiments; (c) provide techniques for analysis of nonlinear dynamic conditioning paradigms, including spectral analyses and Hearst exponents; (d) address why the context can be more powerful than discrete CSs; and (e) develop a theory for the attraction to signs, and the handing-off of this attraction to their significates. Health implications: If people naturally behaved well, health promotion would be mundane. People do not behave well because they find the attraction to food, drugs, risk and aggression more powerful than attraction to the benefits of abstinence. This proposal is predicated on a theory of approach to attractors and signs of them. It provides new measurement tools for the vacillation in motivations over epochs of abstinence and relapse. It embeds the theory of conditioning in a real-time, closed-loop context, and develops requisite analytic tools. The pigeon's attraction to a response that has proven self-defeating a thousand times is perhaps not different in kind than an addict's craving and relapse. By providing statistically powerful tests of competing models of underlying behavioral machinery, we may get closer to understanding how to mitigate such fatal obsessions.