STIMULUS SAMPLING THEORY – WILLIAM K.

ESTES
 SST represents a formalization of Guthrie’s approach to stimulus-
response Associationism.
 The stimulus situation is represented as a population of independently
variable components or aspects of the total environment, called stimulus
elements. At any moment (experimental trial), only a sample of elements
from the total population is active or effective. The less variable the
experimental conditions, the less variable are the successive trial samples
of stimulus elements.
 Estes’s theory, the more variable is the stimulus situation from trial to
trial, the lower is the percentage of stimuli of the total situation present on
each trial, so the slower will be the rate of conditioning the whole
population of stimuli.
 Two sources of random variation in stimulation may be identified:
the first arises from incidental changes in the environment during the
experiment (extraneous noises, temperature fluctuations, stray odors,
etc.); and the second arises from changes in the subject, either from
changing orientation of his receptors (what he is looking at or listening
to), from changes in his posture or response-produced stimuli, or from
fluctuations in his sensory transmission system (e.g., the temporal and
spatial pattern of electrical activity in the auditory cortex evoked by the
sound of a bell).
 When verbal stimuli are presented in human subjects, variability in
encoding may occur due to different implicit associations or
interpretations aroused by the material upon different occasions. There is
no commitment to any fixed amount of such stimulus variability;
 On each trial, only a sample of the N elements will be active or effective.
 the theory assumes that each stimulus element is conditioned to
(connected to) one response.
 In a two-choice experiment, say, some elements would be connected to
response alternative A1 and some to the other alternative, A2; in a free-
operant situation, A1 might be “pressing the lever” and A2 would denote
any behavior other than lever-pressing.

 It is supposed that the conditional connection between a stimulus element

and a response is unitary and at full strength, not varying in degree.
 According to this approach, we can characterize the subject’s dispositions
at any moment in our situation by listing the various stimulus elements
and the relevant response which is currently associated with each
 element. Such a listing is the theoretical “state of the system” as it
applies to an individual at this time. Throughout the course of learning,
the elements will be changing their associations for this subject;
alternatively, we would say that the state of the system is changing trial
by trial.
 There is equal sampling probability to each element. Because of this
assumption, we do not need to know which elements are associated with
which responses in order to predict response probability. All we really
need to know is what proportion of the stimulus elements are associated
with each response. For example, in a two-response experiment, we could
let p denote the proportion of elements associated with response A1 and 1
—p denote the remaining proportion of elements associated with
response A2.
 Performance on any trial is determined by the elements which are
experienced, or “sampled,” on that trial. The probability of any response
is assumed to be equal to the proportion of sampled elements on that trial
that are connected to that response. If a sample of size 10 contains 5
elements connected to A,, 3 to A2, and 2 to A3, then the probabilities are
0.5, 0.3, and 0.2, respectively, that the response will be A1} A2, or A3.
  Instead of considering R to represent a single response, he broke the
concept of response into two parts: the R-class, and the R-occurrence.
Each R-occurrence is a member of some R-class, and manifests the
necessary characteristics required to satisfy some experimental definition
of a ‘correct’ response. For example, in a bar-pressing experiment, the R-
class might be defined to include any act that depresses the bar. “Any
movement of the organism which results in sufficient depression of the
bar to actuate the recording mechanism is counted as an instance of the
class
 a stimulus sample and responded, the subject then receives some
reinforcing outcome. It is these outcomes that change the conditional
connections of the elements sampled on a trial, thus altering the state of
the system. In theory, if r response classes have been identified, then r+1
theoretical reinforcing events are defined, denoted E0, Elf E2, . . . , Er. It
is sup¬ posed that exactly one of these reinforcing events occurs at the
termination of the trial.