692

AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION

The Rate of Establishtnent of a Discrimination. B. F. SKINNER, Harvard University. A method utilizing the rate at which a reflex is elicited under constant stimulation as a measure of its strength during the processes of conditioning and extinction is used in investigating the establishment of a discrimination. An arbitrary reflex, the pressing down: ward of a light lever by a rat, is originally conditioned when the response is followed immediately by the delivery of food into a convenient tray and is extinguished when the response is not so followed. In the present case the reflex is alternately reconditioned and extinguished by allowing the response to be followed by the delivery of food only at set intervals. The separate curves for extinction then fuse, and the reflex assumes a constant strength, which is maintained without significant modification for as many as thirty experimental hours. The value of the strength assumed is a function of the interval at which the reflex is reconditioned. At the higher rates of elicitation, i.e., with shorter intervals, the delivery of the food eventually comes to inhibit the reflex for part of the succeeding interval, but a compensatory effect leaves the total number of responses per interval unchanged. In establishing a discrimination an extra stimulus is introduced at each reconditioning but is omitted during the intervening periods of extinction. The response to the lever-plusextra-stimulus then remains fully conditioned, while the response to the lever alone is extinguished. The curve given experimentally for this change has the properties of the normal curve for extinction, examples of which are given. A quantitative difference probably measures the overlap of the two sets of stimuli. The concepts of conditioning and extinction thus afford an adequate description of a discrimination of this type. [15 min.]

NOTE ON THE REVIEWER OF DR. HOLT'S BOOK In the October, 1932, PSYCHOLOGICAL BULLETIN there appeared,, on pages 586 to 600, a review of Animal Drive and the Learning' Process by Edwin B. Holt. Due to an editorial error this review was unsigned. It should have been signed as follows:
ROSWELL P . ANGIER

Yale University Will subscribers and librarians kindly make this correction in their copies. T H E EDITOR