From [Marc Abrams (2004.12.02.2243)]
Thanks for responding Bruce.
I used scare quotes around ‘failed’ for a very specific reason. It has been my understanding that neither party in the collaboration has been satisfied with the results to date.
I did not intend to intimate or suggest that the collaborations were unsuccessful attempts.
It is interesting Bruce, that Rick agreed with my assessment of how we (at least Rick and I) perceived the experiments, and Rick would not pass up such an opportunity to tell me all about it if he felt the attempt was satisfactory to all concerned.
You know how much I appreciate what you are doing. I think it’s important that all of us on CSGnet be aware of what is going on. I was unaware that you are currently working on a project with Bill.
Bruce, if I have learned anything recently it is that you never know where an idea might come from and who might see something you just couldn’t, or say something that triggers a new idea.
Bill Powers did more for me by asking two simple questions and then trying to provide an answer then he did and could, in the last 10 years. What he did was help clarify my thinking on a very central issue to me, but not what he intended.The questions; “What is the difference between the color red and blue or red and salty”?
It is in that spirit that I ask to see the data. I am not interested in critiquing your work. I’m interested in seeing whether method, goal, or design have any alternatives. What went or is not going the way either party expected? What was expected? Why do you think you are not seeing what you anticipated? What do you think your alternatives and choices are at this point?
I think behaviorism has many more problems than just thinking actions provide some insight into the mind. I think the large failure of behaviorism IS NOT its failure to be able to predict ‘behavior’ properly. Powers has shown that behaviorism cannot predict PURPOSE or intent and WITH that behavior. I think this failure lies at the heart of the regeneration of interest in Cogsci after a 40 year period of dominance by behaviorism. It is also this fact and reason why most clinicians disdain ‘theorists’. It provides no useful insight into the work these people do. In fact behaviorism has never provided and answer to mind, and THAT is what psychologists are after.
David Goldstein is a great example of this. I use David because he is familiar to most on this list. David has more methods and ‘theories’ then Carter has pills. This is not intended as a slam. This is a REQUIREMENT for David to be an effective therapist. David has been involved with PCT for a very long time and holds a Ph.D. in Psychology. He is NOT a dummy nor is he an ideologue. Yes, he has struggled, in my view, in trying how to ‘apply’ this wonderful concept of an input control system. The method of levels provide his best and his most comfortable use of the theory. Fred Nichols is a world class consultant. he has written any number of wonderful papers on organizational management and he two has struggled to figure out how to apply it and feigns ignorance when the only ignorance he has is his inability to date of figuring out how all this affects what he SEE’S. The same holds true for Ed Ford and others who are ‘applying’ PCT.
Anyone ‘applying’ PCT at this point has figured out a way of incorporating what PCT represents; that is, an input control model, and whatever other ‘theories’ they use to account for the things PCT cannot at this point and the purpose of their work and use.
I say all this Bruce before I even read your post because I want you to know up front what my intent was in asking to see your work.
I feel that ANY work that is done with PCT cannot be a failure under any circumstances because if we are honest with ourselves we will learn just as well and maybe even more by ‘failure’ then we will by success. Failure provides, or I believe should provide, the incentive to find out what went wrong and why. Looking for disconfirmation to me is the corner stone to science and I am tickled pink to see Rick feel the same way. I hope he was not bluffing. I do not believe he was. We will see. It is never easy when your basic principles come into question.
Denial is a very powerful and helpful tool we all use to help us maintain any major unpleasant events. I believe denial is a control process, as I believe all cognitive processes are and control systems spare no one. They are absolutely RUTHLESS in their attempts to reach its goal. But they have found some very interesting ‘variants’ in microbiology that prove to be useful. The concept of ‘BI-stability’ comes to mind.
Anyway, it is in this spirit Bruce that I read your response. I have come back here Bruce to tell you I did read the post before I wrote what you just read. I just saw the first paragraph and responded to that first.
After finishing my response I have come back here because this was an exceptional post and this provides the very reason why I think we need to share the work we do and if we feel we are in competition with each other that cannot happen in a profitable way. I am eager to hear your response to my comments. Again, thanks for sharing.
In a message dated 12/2/2004 10:11:30 PM Eastern Standard Time, babbott@MFIRE.COM writes:
[From Bruce Abbott (2004.12.02.2205 EST)]
Well, at the moment I don’t have access to the data (I’m at home and it’s at work) and even if I did, it would take more time to resurrect them that I have available at present.
OK, so your answer here is that you are not interested in going over old ground. No one asked for it this evening and no one asked for it within a certain time frame. If you don’t want to go here I have no problem with that. If you don’t feel it would be of any value to look at I fully respect your opinion. I just think it would be interesting for us on CSGnet to see the pro’s and con’s of a psychological experiment as conducted by a control theorist.
I did not intend to put you on the spot.
And I wouldn’t call what Bill Powers and I were doing together as “failed collaborations.”
Neither would I. See above.
(I think we collaborated quite nicely!)
Bruce, I could care less whether you and Bill ‘got along.’ I’m not Cindy Adams Why would you think I would think otherwise?
But what are you counting as a “failed” experiment?
I don’t know. Whatever you did was never really gone over on CSGnet. I just remember certain posts where the ‘results’ were discussed and you and Bill seemed to disagree on what the results meant. No data was ever presented that I either remember or saw. If it was, please point me to the time frame if you can or the subject thread if you can remember, I have the CSGnet archive disk and would like to see the discussion if possible.
If you could, at your leisure and with some free time if you could get together WHATEVER you feel might be worth looking at I would greatly appreciate it.
Neither produced results that were “dismissed out of hand” by Bill Powers.
By this I meant that the results were not discussed on CSGnet extensively. And by extensively I mean that the results were not discussed among others on CSGnet besides you and Bill. Rick doesn’t seem to know much about them as well.
In the cyclic ratio study, the ratio size was varied systematically over a range of 2 to 64 lever-presses per food-pellet delivery. Staddon and Ettinger proposed that rats in this situation are controlling for a certain rate of pellet delivery.
Why? I don’t mean to be ignorant, but what does it matter how fast or slow a rat presses the lever? What is this action supposed to represent?
The conversion of a given rate of lever-presses into a given rate of pellet delivery constitutes the environmental feedback function of the control system. As the ratio of presses to pellets is increased, it takes more presses to produce a food pellet, reducing the rate of pellet delivery for a given rate of pressing. Staddon and Ettinger predicted that, as the ratio increased, rats would increase their press-rate in an attempt to maintain the reference rate of pellet delivery, and that’s what they apparently found.
And the significance of the original study by Staddon and Ettinger was supposed to show what?
Is this meant to show that a rat will maintain whatever behavior they need to in order to maintain or gain a certain amount of food? If not what did I miss?
In my replication of their study I found that the rate of pressing actually remained constant across the different ratios, and that the apparent increase in response rates that Staddon and Ettinger reported was actually an artifact of the way they analyzed their data. The rats were not defending against the reduced pellet delivery rate resulting from the disturbance to that rate produced by increasing the ratio.
Assuming my speculation about what the purpose was intended to show, I might ask these questions. How often did you repeat the experiment with the same rats? At the same and different times of the day. When and how often were the rats fed?
How do you know how a rat ‘analyzes’ data? That is, how do you make the claim that the behavior is due to an ‘analysis’ by the rat?
Although this result was disappointing (in that I was looking for evidence of control of pellet delivery rate and did not find it),
Why would you be looking for the control of delivery rate? What does that represent? Why would a rat want to control the rate? Do rats eat everything available like dogs or do they eat like cats and eat just what they want at any given point in time, coming back as often as needed, but not ‘pigging’ out.
the findings do not argue against PCT. They merely show that in this situation food pellet delivery rate was not a controlled variable. The animal may be lever-pressing not to maintain a rate of pellet delivery but to make a pellet available for consumption. Consuming the pellet disturbs this controlled variable (the pellet is no longer available for consumption) and lever-pressing then resumes.
To bad you can’t do the TesT on the rat. 
But I think this is very useful because it shows one of the major problems with behavioristic experiments. If you can’t always figure the intent of another human by observing their actions How can you hope to do this when you have ABSOLUTELY no idea about how a rat thinks. You might be able to know that a rat like all other living organism’s, have certain intrinsic needs and drives. And when looking at brain fMri’s and bodily chemical processes, we can make some inferences based on what they (other animals) and we (humans) have in common and share and what we don’t.
Trying to interpret what another organism is ‘thinking’ (or cogniting) or the intent is kind of difficult.
Do rats have ‘emotions’? I think animal studies on the mind are kind of meaningless if you are attempting to understand the higher levels. They are much more useful in looking at the biological processes and correlates.
Bruce, can you see off of this why clinicians might be a bit cynical about ‘theory’ when the basis is on that of a rat?
How about experiments that deal with introspection? I know its difficult, but if you have the ability to develop viable scales of feelings and emotions over time. That is, time series data dealing with cognitive correlates in humans.
The purpose of the measurements is not a way of getting ‘absolute’ values for these things, but to be able to DERIVE ratio scale data for individuals that can be used as a means of measuring the ‘magnitude’ of these higher level concepts like ‘anger’ and ‘happiness’ and be able to compare people not based on the words people use but on the derived scales. I used this technique 20 years ago to great effect in my consulting work as a way to get people to see that the words people use are often misleading in terms of how they may actually feel and in trying to figure out how ‘angry’ someone needs to be before problems begin can be important. Looking back this would have been a very useful way of ‘experimenting’ with groups of people I was doing SD modeling work for. I used this in my pre-PCT days and of course this tool was not intended for this purpose but I think it would be wonderful.
The second project was developed by me with input from Rick and Bill during the design phase. The idea was to train a rat to press a lever for food pellets in the operant chamber during daily one-hour sessions.
Why?
Generally the animal cannot earn enough food during a single one-hour session to maintain its body weight over a 24-hour period, so supplemental food is given in the home cage after the experimental session.
Interesting. Are you saying the rat knows how to get food yet would starve itself rather then press the lever? Are you sure the rat can make the connection between lever press and food?
The amount of supplemental food given in the home cage was varied over the course of the experiment and constituted a disturbance to the rat’s nutrient control system.
How do you know this? Do you always feel the same way after eating the same amount of food. There are days I can eat a house and others barely a nibble. With no changes in anything I do.
Reducing the amount of supplemental food would require an increased rate of lever-pressing and food consumption in the operant chamber if the rat were to maintain a reasonably constant rate of food intake over successive days. Increasing the amount of supplement would require either that the rat not consume all the available supplement in the home cage or that is earn and consume less food in the operant chamber, if the overall level of food intake were to remain constant. Finally, if the level of nutrients to be consumed was specified by the level of stored body fat in a fat-control system, then it might be expected that changes in the reference would take place relatively slowly (as the animal gradually gained or lost weight). This would produce a lag between changing the amount of available supplement in the home cage and adjustment of consumption in the operant chamber.
And this finding would show what? Control? IF this were the case I would have the same questions for you I currently have for Bill but unlike Bill you have no idea how a rat thinks.
So I think this shows very nicely that rats DO NOT control their actions. Which is in perfect harmony with PCT. What is controlled in PCT is INTENT or purpose and NOT actions, and you have no way of ever actually finding out why the rats did what they did?
Do you see my assessment differently?
That is more-or-less what we found. Unfortunately, the apparent level of control was relatively poor.
Predictable though. Why did you expect the results to be otherwise?
Part of the problem was traced to apparent changes in the rats’ metabolic rates. It appears that the rats could counter disturbances both by changing their rates of food consumption and by changing the rates at which they “burned” their fuel. I had no direct way to measure these apparent changes in metabolic rates, so an important potential part of the actions used to control fat storage could not be included in the model.
This is not, in my view, a ‘problem.’ These experiments, to me, seem go right to the core and root with what might be one of the limitations of behavioristic experiments. You have no know way of knowing how ‘hungry’ a rat feels and what produces that feeling. Even if you knew in general what chemical reactions and processes are involved, how, without ‘asking’ each rat how hungry they might be at any point in time? AND if they are in the ‘mood’ to eat?
On the other hand this does not make all of behaviorism ‘bad.’ I think Bill Powers and his use of introspection is both a very useful and necessary thing in order to study the ‘Mind.’ After all, all we ever know exists within the confines of our heads. So any experiments that are done with the intent of studying the ‘Mind’ must figure out a way of doing it by using individuals with introspection and I believe there are existing tools available for this purpose.
No, the ‘measuring’ tools will not allow for the reproduction of a human cognitive system, but I think we can get a pretty good idea about how all this happens even though we may not be able to ‘predict’ it for any one individual.
I think it could be like Darwin’s theory of evolution and that is a descriptive rather than a predictive theory
But this wasn’t the whole problem. There were also limits on how much the rats would eat >during the hour-long sessions in the operant chamber. Our model and plans had not >included the possible role of short-term satiety in limiting the amount of food that would be >consumed during these sessions. It was clear that the rats could hold more food (as they >did when they had lost weight), but would quit eating before this limit was reached.
This was most likely due to the food that had been consumed early in the session >reaching the small intestine and its nutrient content starting to enter the bloodstream. The >amount consumed was not enough to maintain weight when the home-cage supplement >was small, and there was no way to make up for the loss later, even though the rat’s >nutrient-control mechanism would normally produced another bout of feeding at that time if >food had been available.
Well, this answers one of my questions.
Thus, in my interpretation, the restrictions my procedure imposed on feeding meant that short-term nutrient-control would lead to problems in maintaining longer-term fat-level control. As body weight was lost, the animal would increase the amount eaten in the operant chamber, but conflict with short-term control over blood-stream nutrient-levels and stomach loading meant that the rat would not increase its intake sufficiently to prevent further weight loss.
Lets assume you’re correct in your assessment here. What is the significance of the finding? What does this mean in terms of human behavior?
Do you really think you could not conduct a test of this type on humans? That is, why use rats in an experiment of this type? I am not challenging you here Bruce, I’m ignorant about design and I’m eager to learn. I have asked you these questions because logically this is how I think. Not because I think I have some unique ability to assess psychological experimental designs I want to know if I can why you do what you do.
To make a long story short, we learned some things in this study and would do it differently now to avoid the problems encountered, but we still did see evidence of control at two levels even if the fit of model to data was not as good as it might have been if we had been able to measure metabolic rate changes and had not allowed short-term factors to conflict with long-term body-fat regulation (as measured by body weight).
So, the real reason for the experiment was to show the existence of control in a rat. Yes? Or was it to show a specific intent in the rat? Help me out here.
I probably should add one more study to the mix. In this one I replicated previous studies >showing that rate of lever-pressing for food on a variable-interval schedule declines as the >average interval size increases. Increasing the average interval size reduces the average >rate of pellet delivery, and Bill had predicted that the animals would increase their rates of >responding as the interval size increased, in an effort to compensate for the reduced rate of >pellet delivery imposed by the longer schedule. This demonstrates rather conclusively that >Bill’s model was wrong (rate of pellet delivery was not acting like a controlled variable, just >as it was not in the cyclic ratio study).
VERY interesting. So Bill could not predict behavior either could he? Hmmmm. Maybe what you helped show in this experiment is that behavior, as PCT predicts is NEVER controlled. It is ALWAYS the INTENT that is controlled, or the purpose if you will. That is, the MIND needs to be the focus of attention NOT the ACTIONS of an organism. What gets controlled is our interpretation (perceptions) of how well or poorly our perceptions match our intent or purpose.
Every action we produce is in response to some specific error. We learn that certain actions will generally produce certain results, so when we are hungry (error) we learn that putting something in our mouth and ingesting it will satisfy that need. That is reduce the error and by doing this we will ‘feel’ ‘better.’ The ‘reason’ we eat is to feel better. The 'reason we eat is also because of control. Some errors are cognitive and involve consciousness and others don’t.
However, on VI schedules, rates of lever-pressing beyond a certain minimum have little if >any detectable effect of the rate of pellet delivery.
Please explain the significance of this?
Given that increasing the rate of pressing was not “working,” (in the sense of opposing >the disturbance of lowered pellet-delivery rates),
An assumption and speculation in the sense that you really don’t know why this was happening.
the animals might have been undergoing reorganization, which would entail an increased >level of behavioral variability in an ecoli->type random “search” for a more effective way to >produce food.
OK, so here you are saying you don’t have a real idea as to what is going on and you are attributing it to some unknown process or processes.
Please tell me what you agree with me on and what you don’t and most importantly why you feel the way you do. I have the greatest deal of respect for your efforts and if your experiments are like this, there is no doubt we can all learn a lot by them.
Maybe not what you intended , but learn nonetheless.
I think exposing experimental ideas might prove useful IF folks were sincerely interested in helping YOU and willing to discuss the issues. I for one am. I have learned a great deal in this one post and I hope with your response and subsequent clarifications and with hopefully the input of others, maybe we can all contribute to some future designs that are profitable for all.
Thanks a bunch Bruce.
Marc
But I think this is very useful because it shows one of the major problems with behavioristic experiments. If you can’t always figure the intent of another human by observing their actions How can you hope to do this when you have ABSOLUTELY no idea about how a rat thinks. You might be able to know that a rat like all other living organism’s, have certain intrinsic needs and drives. And when looking at brain fMri’s and bodily chemical processes, we can make some inferences based on what they (other animals) and we (humans) have in common and share and what we don’t.