Discrimination, reinforcement, and resistance to change

University Of New Hampshire, Durham NH

Investigators

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Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): To effect behavior change, it is not sufficient simply to establish desirable behavior in a therapeutic setting. It is also necessary that desirable behavior be persistent in the face of daily challenges after therapy ends. In addition, the behavior must be appropriate to the varying circumstances of daily life, which requires attending to and remembering the relations between situations, actions, and consequences. Our research on this project to date has shown that reinforcing consequences affect the persistence of attention and memory in the same way as simple operant responding. Reinforcement-based teaching methods can improve learning to distinguish among different stimuli in people with developmental disabilities, and can enhance short-term memory in clinical patients with neurological deficits. Reinforcement effects on attending and remembering are also relevant to drug abuse: Drugs are potent reinforcers and therefore increase attention to events associated with drugs and make those occasions more memorable. At the same time, drug reinforcement may make attending to and remembering drug-related events more resistant to change, and those events may in turn occasion further abuse. This project will continue to explore ways in which reinforcement can establish persistent attending and remembering, and evaluate various methods for disrupting control by environmental stimuli. One goal of this project is to develop and test a new quantitative theory of attending and remembering that combines an existing model of discrimination performance with an existing model of behavioral persistence. A second goal is to develop novel experimental methods to evaluate the terms of the model. A third goal is to identify effective methods for increasing or decreasing the strength of attending and remembering in short- term working memory. The basic behavioral processes examined here are central to research and theory on learning and memory. They are also important for understanding the persistence of maladaptive behavior such as seeking and attending to cues that trigger drug abuse, and for establishing desirable discriminations that are remembered accurately and are highly resistant to change.