Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior最新文献

A vast literature highlights the prevalence of impulsive decision making in maladaptive outcomes. Most research has focused on one form-delay discounting. Less research has focused on effort discounting, possibly because of a lack of a standardized task for assessment. In published effort-discounting tasks, effort is conceptualized in many ways, making it difficult to compare findings across studies. Additionally, most effort-discounting tasks do not control for the time inherent in completing the effortful task, which makes it difficult to disentangle effort discounting from delay discounting. The current study evaluated the validity of a novel hypothetical effort-discounting task. The novel task was used to evaluate the influence of the effort-delay confound on rates of effort discounting in humans. Participants were randomly assigned to complete a confounded or a controlled version of the novel effort-discounting task. The effort-discounting data were well described by hyperbolic and exponential functions. When effort and delay were confounded, effort-discounting rates were significantly higher than when effort alone influenced discounting. The results suggest that data that are produced by effort-discounting tasks that do not control the effort-delay confound should be interpreted cautiously because they are also influenced by delay discounting. Task limitations and future directions are discussed.

Resurgence is defined as an increase in a previously extinguished target response (B₁) resulting from the worsening of conditions for a more recently reinforced alternative response (B₂). Worsening includes extinction or reductions in rate, amount, and immediacy of delivery of food or some other phylogenetically important event (PIE). In the first part of the article, we apply the laws of allocation, induction, and covariance to understand not only resurgence of operant activity previously covarying with the PIE (B₁) but also a constellation of ontogenetic and phylogenetic activities both related to the PIE (B₀) and unrelated to the PIE (B_N). In the second part, we discuss how induction might be incorporated into and provide alternative processes within an existing matching-based framework, resurgence as choice (RaC). We begin to identify how this range of activities could depend on changes in the relative competitive weight (V) of all available activities (B₁, B₂, B₀, B_N) in addition to only those receiving explicit training (B₁, B₂). Future empirical and theoretical research is needed within this framework to provide a more complete understanding of resurgence and behavior more generally.

The purpose of the current study was to extend the research on the possible role of verbal mediation in the establishment of comparative relations. We conducted four experiments in which 14 participants received conditional discrimination training with nonarbitrary and arbitrary stimuli, followed by derived comparative and transformation of function tests. Participants learned to select the smallest or biggest comparison across multiple exemplars in the presence of abstract samples. Next, participants learned to select arbitrary comparisons in the presence of contextual cues to establish a size ranking among comparisons. To assess verbal mediation during mutual and combinatorial entailment tests, participants were instructed to talk out loud. When they failed to perform correctly during derived relations tests, participants were trained to tact and intraverbally relate stimuli. The results suggest that relational training alone was not sufficient to establish comparative relations and that adult participants engaged in problem solving consistent with intraverbal bidirectional naming during emergent relations tests.

Resurgence can be defined as increases in previously reinforced and subsequently extinguished target responding when conditions for an alternative response worsen. Worsening of alternative conditions, such as extinction, has been linked to relapse of clinically relevant behavior. Preclinical researchers have evaluated whether punishing target responses while differentially reinforcing an alternative response could reduce resurgence when conditions are worsened with extinction, with mixed results. In the present investigation, we systematically replicated this line of research with human participants recruited via crowdsourcing, using response cost as punishment. During Phase 1, we reinforced target responses with 100 points per delivery, exchangeable for money. During Phase 2, we reinforced alternative responses, discontinued point reinforcement for target responses, and parametrically manipulated across groups the magnitude of point loss (1, 100, 320, or 1,000 points) contingent on target responses. During Phase 3, we tested for resurgence by extinguishing target and alternative responses. Added punishment systematically decreased target responding during Phase 2 but did not influence resurgence during Phase 3. With a meta-analysis, we compared our findings with existing research examining a range of punishers and species. The results of the meta-analysis comport with the present findings, suggesting that the inclusion of punishment reduces target responding during DRA but, overall, has no systematic effects on resurgence.

The principles of social justice, equity, diversity, inclusion (JEDI) have received increasing attention in behavior analysis circles, but the conversation has largely centered on implications for applied behavior analysis practice and research. It may be less clear to researchers who conduct basic and translational research how JEDI principles can inform and inspire their work. This article synthesizes publications from behavior analysis and other scientific fields about tactics of JEDI-informed research. We organized this scholarship across five stages of research from developing the research question to sharing findings and curated sources for an audience of behavioral science researchers. We discuss reflexive practice, representation, belongingness, participatory research, quantitative critical theory, and open science, among other topics. Some researchers may have already adopted some of the practices outlined, some may begin new practices, and some may choose to conduct experimental analyses of JEDI problems. Our hope is that those actions will be reinforced by the behavior analysis scientific community. We conclude by encouraging the leadership of this journal to continue to work toward the structural changes necessary to make the experimental analysis of behavior just, equitable, diverse, and inclusive.

Literature concerning operant behavioral economics shows a strong preference for the coefficient of determination (R²) metric to (a) describe how well an applied model accounts for variance and (b) depict the quality of collected data. Yet R² is incompatible with nonlinear modeling. In this report, we provide an updated discussion of the concerns with R². We first review recent articles that have been published in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior that employ nonlinear models, noting recent trends in goodness-of-fit reporting, including the continued reliance on R². We then examine the tendency for these metrics to bias against linear-like patterns via a positive correlation between goodness of fit and the primary outputs of behavioral-economic modeling. Mathematically, R² is systematically more stringent for lower values for discounting parameters (e.g., k) in discounting studies and lower values for the elasticity parameter (α) in demand analysis. The study results suggest there may be heterogeneity in how this bias emerges in data sets of varied composition and origin. There are limitations when using any goodness-of-fit measure to assess the systematic nature of data in behavioral-economic studies, and to address those we recommend the use of algorithms that test fundamental expectations of the data.