[From Bruce Abbott (960125.1600 EST)]
Bill Powers (960124.1000 MST) --
(Bruce to Rick):
Or in words you would rather not hear used, by reducing intrinsic
error it leads to the cessation of reorganization, which leaves the
current candidate reference in place or "established." Hmmm, so
the occurrence of the incentive _does_ lead to the establishment of
a reference for striking the key, in your view. For a moment there
I thought you were disagreeing with me. (;->It also leads to not pressing the key, or to pressing a key with a red
light on over it, or to turning in a circle, or to going through a
particular door -- in other words, it leads to any behavior whatsoever,
depending on the effect that behavior has on producing the incentive. So
there is no general way to link an incentive to any particular effect on
any particular behavior.
Either you have taken the sentence beginning "Hmmm" out of context, or you
are arguing that your proposed reorganization process doesn't work. I'll
bet it's the former.
When you are dealing with a specific case, it appears that an incentive
can cause a particular act like pecking on a key. So you are misled into
thinking that this particular incentive must have something innate to do
with making animals peck on keys. You begin to think that food given
under certain circumstances must be hooked up to the pecking muscles of
this species of animal. You begin to wonder what is in the food that
gives it this special effect. You start putting adulterants into the
food, to see if you can alter its effect on key-pecking. You start
changing the external circumstances to see if that will alter the
connection between food intake and key pecking.
Sorry Bill, but this "you" guy definitely has straw coming out of his sleeves.
Killeen's theory does NOT assume that incentive deliveries magically produce
keypecking. In fact, he provides a detailed mechanism by which keypecks,
once they occur, would become differentially "incited" by incentive
deliveries, as opposed to such deliveries producing other activities. The
ground for criticizing Killeen's theory lies elsewhere.
This it where I have trouble with this explanation. Reorganization
is said to come into play when "intrinsic" variables are in
"persistent" error, and to stop when this error is "corrected."
That's a fairly slow process. I don't see how one brief grain-
delivery (or even several) is going to have much impact on the
level of deprivation (intrinsic error), yet the pigeon goes back
and repeats what it just did (in terms of result of action).You exaggerate. It takes more than a few grain deliveries to get the
pigeon pecking consistently in the right place. I seem to recall a
discussion about shaping, a couple of months ago, in which it was
remarked how hard it is to get pigeons to learn to peck on a key to get
food -- how one has to start by rewarding any move in the right
direction, and then gradually and patiently narrow the requirements, so
at any given time only a small change in the pigeon's behavior is
required. The time scale seems quite appropriate to the operation of a
reorganizing system.
No, I do not exaggerate. I was aware that you might "call" me on this
example when I wrote it, but I didn't want to add confusion by switching
organisms and manipulanda in mid-argument. Pigeons don't strike lighted,
beak-level response keys without training, so without such training there is
no chance that the pigeon would happen to experience the relationship
between keypecking and the raising of the grain hopper. Under that
condition even random reorganization would not work. There is no such
problem for rats' lever-pressing. If the rats are first given the
opportunity to associate the sound of the feeder with the appearance of a
food pellet in the cup, acquisition of lever-pressing can be quite rapid --
a matter of two or three pairings of lever-press and food delivery. This
time-scale seems too short for the reorganizing system, in that intrinsic
variables would hardly have been affected by then. I'm not saying that the
proposed reorganization system is invalidated by this observation -- it may
be the only available method under some conditions -- but it certainly
suggests that a faster, more efficient mechanism may be at work in this case.
The basic idea -- that you stop looking for a solution to a problem
the moment you find it -- seems reasonable enough, but the
mechanism involved in identifying the problem and the solution
seems too sluggish and too dependent on error at the highest level
in the hierarchy.There are some who seem to disagree with me, but I don't consider the
reorganizing system to be part of the hierarchy, much less its highest
level.
You say that reorganization involves error in _intrinsic_ variables; this is
the error found at the highest level of the hierarchy, correct? I have said
nothing about the relationship of the reorganizing system to the hierarchy
beyond this.
Regards,
Bruce