Catania Ch. 11 12 13. Cooper

Catania Ch.
11, 12, 13
Ch. 11
The Nature of Discriminated Operant

- When responding is reinforced only in the presence of some stimulus, we say that
reinforcement is correlated with that stimulus. For convenience we might say in the
presence of a stimulus to during a stimulus. Responding is controlled in this way by
stimulus is said to be discriminated.
- A response class created by such differential reinforcement with respect to stimulus
properties is called a discriminated operant.
- There is probably no such thing as an operant class without discriminative stimuli.
- Features that remain relatively constant throughout an experiment, such as the chamber
itself along with the devices in it are sometimes called contextual stimuli.
- Discriminative stimuli correspond to those colloquially called signals or cues. They don’t’
elicit responses rather they set the occasion on which responses have consequences and
are said to occasion responses.
- SD – discriminative stimuli
- S+ positive stimulus
- For the one correlated with nonreinforcement or extinction is it S(delta) or S- for negative
stimulus
- One class is correlated with a reinforcement contingency, the other is the class during
which responding occurs, We are interested not in either class alone but rather in their
correspondence.
- Differential reinforcement underlies discrimination and generalization just as it underlies
differentiation and induction. Both involve correspondences between the dimensions
upon which differential reinforcement is based and the dimensions of the resulting
behavior.
Signal Detections: Breast Self-Examination

- A stimulus may be below threshold or too weak to be detected. Two stimuli may be so
close together they cannot be told apart, their separation may not exceed their difference
threshold.
o This provides the basis for signal detection theory.
- Breast examinations have been studied extensively as a discriminative skill that can be
taught.
- This example emphasizes discrimination learning as behavior rather than as a passive
outcome of exposure to stimuli.
- Discriminating is something we do!
Attending to Properties of Stimuli

- Stimulus properties to which an organism is likely to respond are sometimes called
salient, but salience isn’t a property of the organism – it is actually a property of the
organism’s behavior with respect to that stimulus.
- Organisms typically response to some stimulus properties and not to others, so we can
hardly talk about discriminated operant without also talking about attention.
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- If attending is behavior, then is can have consequences.
- Attending is not defined by movement; it is defined in terms of its consequences.
- once an organism has attended to some stimulus properties in one situation, it is likely to
attend to those properties in new situations.
- We can change the likelihood that an organism will attend to stimulus properties simply
by changing the way in which reinforcement is correlated with them.
- Attention is crucial in development – in join attention, a parent’s routine interactions with
a child will ordinarily shape the child’s looking so that instead of looking at the paren’ts
face when the parent speaks, the child begins to look where the parent is looking or
pointing.
Generalization Gradients
- If responding is reinforced during some stimulus and a property of that stimulus is varied,
responding may depend on how much the stimulus has changed.
o For example, it a pigeon’s key pecks are reinforced when the key is yellow during
training, the pigeon will peck at lower rates as the light is changed to orange or
red or violet etc. This demonstrates generalization: the effect of reinforcement
during yellow spreads to other colours.
Inhibitory Gradients
- The effects of extinction
- To determine whether a stimulus reduces responding, there must be some responding to
start with.
Feature – Positive Discrimination

- Nominal and functional stimulus (p.147)
Fading: Stimulus Control by Successive Approximations

- Discriminating between a mother call vs. another’s call
- Just as the response properties that define an operant can be changed gradually by
shaping, the stimulus properties that define discriminated operants can be changed
gradually by analogous procedures called fading.
- Creating stimulus control through fading is often effective, but as with shaping no rules
exist for how rapidly stimuli should be faded in or out in different situations.
- Shaping requires that some behaviour is available to be shaped and fading requires that
some discriminative responding is available to be shifted to a new stimulus dimension.
The Vocabulary of Differential Reinforcement

- Both differentiation and discrimination involve differential reinforcement.
- The major difference is whether differential reinforcement is imposed on properties of
responding or on properties of the stimuli during which responding occurs.
- Differential reinforcement can be based on simple dimensions of stimuli such as intensity
or location
- Properties essential to discriminating among different letters are called critical features.
- Discriminated operants are behavior classes defined by the stimuli that occasion
responding.
Natural Concepts and Probabilistic Stimulus Classes
- We can speak of concepts as generalizations within a class of stimuli and discrimination
between classes.
- Being to the left of is ambiguous and in relation to a reference point
- Time is another dimension with ambiguous properties.
- It is often difficult to define discriminative stimuli by physical dimensions.
- Pigeons have been taught to discriminate between pictures that contain a human form and
those that don’t – such discriminations have been called natural concepts.
- Natural concepts are examples of probabilistic stimulus classes, classes in which each
member contains some subset of features, but none is common to all.
- Some probabilistic stimulus classes are defined by reference to a prototype – a prototype
is a typical member of a probabilistic class: it is derived from a weighted average of all
the feature of all members of the class. For example, birds are a probabilistic class
because most fly, but ostriches and penguins don’t.
- Defining stimulus class is a general problem. Appeals to physical measurement don’t
resolve it
- Behavior classes depend on the common contingencies that created them and not on their
physical properties.
- Stimulus control is as fundamental with respect to our own scientific behaviour has it is
with respect to the behaviour of the organisms we study.
Study Guide Chapter 11
Chapter 11
1) What is a SD (or S+) and an SΔ (or S-) and how do they influence responding?
Provide a practical example to illustrate the process
- SD: a stimulus correlated with reinforcement when another is correlated with extinction
2) What does Catania mean when he said that the “lever pressing was under the
stimulus control of the light” (p. 138). How can one develop ‘stimulus control’?
Provide a practical example of when stimulus control would be helpful for the
practitioner.
- Lever pressing was under the stimulus control of the light
-
3) What is the difference ‘differentiation’ and ‘discrimination’? How do consequences

influence the discrimination of stimuli preceding a response? (hint: see table 11-1)
- Both differentiation and discrimination involve differential reinforcement.
- The major difference is whether differential reinforcement is imposed on properties of
responding or on properties of the stimuli during which responding occurs.
-
4) What is signal detection and how does it influence responding? Provide a practical
example (not in the text) of how sensory deficits can influence signal detection.
-
5) How is attention related to stimulus discrimination? What did Catania mean when he
said “Attending is not defined by movement; it is defined in terms of its consequences” (pg.
141)? (hint: stimulus dimensions)
- Attending – discrimination based upon a stimulus feature or dimension
- Attending is not defined by movement it is defined in terms of consequences – stimulus
dimensions
6) What is a generalization? What effect does discrimination training have on

generalization? Provide a practical example (not in the text) to illustrate the process.
- Responding similarly across different stimuli – if there is no discrimination training on a
graph the gradients will be flat
-
7) What is stimulus fading? How can it influence stimulus control? What might be a
practical use of stimulus fading?
- Fading: a procedure for transferring control of responding from one stimulus or set of
stimuli to another by gradually removing one while the other is gradually introduced –
stimuli may be faded in or not.
o Example – once a pigeon discriminates key colors, the discrimination may be
transferred to line orientation by maintaining differential reinforcement while
gradually fading out color intensity and fading in line intensity.
8) What is a stimulus class and how does this relate to our development of concepts? (hint:
includes related terms of generalization, discrimination & critical features).
Features that remain relatively constant throughout an experiment such as the chamber itself
along with the devices in it, are sometimes
- s called contextual stimuli
-
Ch. 12: Conditional Discrimination and Stimulus Class
- Discrimination may be effective under some conditions but not others.

- Matching and oddity are relational properties of stimuli.
- As we learn to respond in consistent ways to objects or events, we also learn to
discriminate among features, sometimes called abstract or relational, that are independent
of particular objects or events.
Relations as Stimulus Dimensions

- Many conditional discriminations involve arbitrary relations between a conditional
discriminative stimulus and the discriminations for which it sets the occasion.
Matching – to Sample and Oddity
- Matching to sample is illustrated as we might arrange it in a three-key pigeon chamber in
Figure 12-1.
- A common feature of matching – to -sample is a correction procedure which repeats the
same samples and comparisons on the next trial f a trial ends with a peck on a
nonmatching key. This procedure prevents the development of responding restricted to
only one key or color, but it also guarantees that errors are often closely followed by the
reinforcers produced by correct responses.
- Matching to sample has sometimes between called identify matching, but we reserve that
term for cases in which matching generalizes to novel samples and comparisons, such as
matching or forms after training with colours.
- If reinforcement is arranged for pecks on the nonmatching rather than the matching
comparison, the procedure becomes an instance of oddity responding,
- In some experiments pigeons rarely show generalized matching or generalized oddity; in
others they do well. One condition that makes a big difference is the number of stimuli
used in the procedure.
- Tasks learned later can interfere with performance on tasks learned earlier (retroaction),
but the effects of tasks learned earlier on those learned later (proaction) are usually even
more powerful.
Symbolic Behavior: Equivalence Classes

- Properties of the relations called reflexivity, symmetry and transivity.
- Reflexive properties are those that hold between a term and itself, symmetrical properties
and itself (e.g. A = A).
- Symmetrical properties are those in which the order of terms is reversible (e.g. If A = B
then B = A).
- Transitive properties are those in which the common terms in two ordered pairs
determine a third ordered pair (e.g. If A = B and B = C, then A = C).
- Equivalence relations are those that have all three properties and the terms that enter into
them (here, A, B, and C) are said to be members of an equivalence class.
- Oppositeness is symmetrical but it is neither reflexive nor transitive
- Magnitude relation such as greater than is transitive but its neither symmetrical nor
reflexive.
- If appropriate matching occurs in these tests, the new relations demonstrated by that
behavior are called emergent relations, in the sense that they’ve emerged without explicit
training; they are examples of novel behavior produced by the arbitrary matching
contingencies.
- Equivalence relations are easily generated in humans.
- Transivity, reflexivity etc. p. 161
- The emergent relations justify calling their performances symbolic matching rather than
arbitrary matching.
- Functional equivalence isn’t the same as membership in an equivalence class and it must
not be assumed that the logical properties of these classes are fully consistent with their
behavioural ones.
Higher Order Classes of Behavior
Learning Set
- The learning of a new discrimination can depend on what the organism has already
learned
- Learning set – responding may depend on relations among stimulus properties
independently of specific stimuli
- The more problems the monkey had mastered, the more rapidly it mastered each new
one.
- One variation on learning set is learned helplessness.
o Rats that receive inescapable and unavoidable electric shock in one situation are
sometimes less likely to learn avoidance when it becomes possible in a new
situation than rats never exposed to inescapable and unavoidable shock.
- Learning set shows that we can’t treat the introduction of an experimentally naïve
organism into a laboratory setting as a simple case
- To study learning, some investigators have therefore turned to the repeated acquisition of
simple discriminations or simple response sequences.
Contingencies Operating on the Sub Classes within Higher Order Classes

- A significant property of higher order classes was implicit in our treatment of self-
injurious behavior
Origins of Structure
-
Chapter 12
1) What is an example of a procedure that shows conditional discrimination?

- Conditional discrimination – discrimination over a response depends on its relationship to
other stimuli
The untrained relationships in equivalence are sometimes called – emergent relations
Learning set is another potential higer order relationship
2) Describe the matching to sample procedure. What is a sample stimulus? The comparison
stimuli? What patterns of responding would reveal an organism has acquired a matching relation
or generalized matching vs. learning a sequence of responses?
3) Distinguish between arbitrary, symbolic and identity matching. Provide an example of each.
4) Define reflexivity, symmetry, and transitivity in terms of the relationship(s) between A,

B, and C.
- reflexive properties are those that hold between a term and itself (A = A)
- symmetrical properties are those in which the order of terms is reversible (if A = B then B
= A)
- transitive properties are those in which the common terms in two ordered pairs determine
a third ordered pair (If A = B and B = C then A = C).
How would you test for reflexivity, symmetry and transitivity using an equivalence class
consisting of three members A: picture of a dog, B: written word dog, C: spoken word dog
- Reflexivity – if you see dog select dog – even though the learner has not been reinforced
for doing so – the untrained performance is called reflexivity – responding to a training
stimulus on the basis of its sameness
o Involves matching a sample to itself
- Symmetry – if AB then BA – selecting dog
- Transitivity refers to the transfer of the relation to new combinations through shared
membership (if AB, then BC, then AC).
- Equivalence class
o Complex behavior that consists of three defining relations of reflexivity,
symmetry, and transivity. Reflexivity refers to identity matching (e.g. daddy is a
specific man, 9 is a specific number)
o Symmetry refers to functional reversibility (e.g. given a picture of a dog, select
the word dog, given the word dog, select the picture of the dog
o Transivity refers to the equivalence of three stimuli (picture of dog, word dog and
saying dog)
5) How is learned helplessness and example of a higher order class. Provide an example of
how repeated training with one problem may produce a higher order class. How could we
test for the presence of a higher order class with novel stimuli?
- One variation on learning set is learned helplessness.
o Rats that receive inescapable and unavoidable electric shock in one situation are
sometimes less likely to learn avoidance when it becomes possible in a new
situation than rats never exposed to inescapable and unavoidable shock.
Chapter 13: Sources of Novel Behavior

- the ways in which words can combine into grammatical sentences is astronomical – this
feature of language is called productivity and shares this with nonverbal behaviour
- because children could not possibly have made contact with all possible sentences in the
language they were mastering, Chomsky appealed to the poverty of the stimulus.
1) Define three sources of novel behavior

a. Differential reinforcement in shaping, fading and the creation of operations
i. Creating new behavior by differentially reinforcing approximations to a
new response or a new stimulus class; creating new behavior by
reinforcing novel instances defined relative to the populations of which
they are members
b. Emergence based on high order classes
i. Setting the occasion for new instances of the members of high-order
classes, including extensions of equivalence classes and frames
c. Combining behaviour classes; adduction, transfer of function and their variation.
i. Bringing the properties or members of difference classes together in new
ways; combining multiple sources of behavior to that new functional
classes emerge.
2) Provide one example of novel behavior emerged from reinforcement of variations
a. Shaping and fading
b. In fading – the main problem is setting the pace for changing the relevant stimuli
rather than setting a criterion for reinforcement.
c. No individual response can have the property on which the contingencies depend
the property depends on its relation to a population of earlier responses.
d. When behaviour is more variable it provides more variants that may be reinforced
and therefore makes shaping quicker and easier.
e. Variability on the stimulus side may also be relevant to fading procedures.
f. Fading can be arranged along single stimulus dimensions, as when colors are
faded out as forms are faded in.
3) Provide one example of novel behavior emerged from equivalence classes or frames
a. Equivalence classes constitute one more example of higher-order classes. Once
I’ve learned that a spoken A is equivalent to a written uppercase A or lowercase a
and that the same is true for spoken and uppercase and lowercase Bs and Cs and
all of the other letters of the alphabet, then for me each of the letters is a high-
order class with its various forms as the members.
b. Relational frames are relatives of equivalence classes in the sense that they are
defined by relations rather than by the exchangeability of members.
c. Equivalent to is defined by the properties of reflexivity, symmetry and transitivity
but only some of the properties hold for other frames such as opposite or greater
than.
d.
4) Provide one example of novel behavior emerged from adduction
a. E.g. the child and the traffic lights – “existing functions of some members will
transfer to others”
b. Suppose a child is taught the equivalence of the spoken word go and green traffic
lights as one class and of the word stop and red traffic lights as another and the
child already goes at the word go and stops at the word stop. If the functions of
the words transfer to the traffic lights, the child will go on green and stop on red
without having to be explicitly taught.
5) Describe relational frames and provide one example
a. Relational framing is the process that underlies language
i. Equivalent to is defined by the properties of reflexivity, symmetry and
transitivity, but only some of these properties hold for other frames such as
opposite or greater.
ii.
6) Describe adduction and provide one example
a. The novel coming together of separate operants has been called adduction
b.
7) Describe joint control and provide one example (p.180)
a. Joint control occurs when common responses to different stimuli mediate
judgements of equivalence or other relations as when a child matches on arbitrary
stimulus to another after having been taught to give the same name to each.
b. Joint control is a discrete event, a change in stimulus control that occurs when a
response topography evoked by one stimulus and preserved by rehearsal is
emitted under the additional control of a second stimulus
c. Joint control is about two stimuli jointly determining the behaviour of a single
individual; it should not be confused with joint attention.
8) Describe fluency and provide one example
a. Fluency – the combination of accuracy and speed that characterizes competent
performance
b. The child must answer both accurately and rapidly and this means continuing to
practice beyond the level of high accuracy alone.
c. Fluency training is a powerful educational tool and students who have bene taught
this way come to excel in reasoning and putting facts together and the various
other skills that make up critical thinking
d. Fluency is about the behavior of the student rather than about the behaviour of the
teacher
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Catania Ch.

The Nature of Discriminated Operant

Signal Detections: Breast Self-Examination

Attending to Properties of Stimuli

Feature – Positive Discrimination

Fading: Stimulus Control by Successive Approximations

The Vocabulary of Differential Reinforcement

Study Guide Chapter 11

3) What is the difference ‘differentiation’ and ‘discrimination’? How do consequences

6) What is a generalization? What effect does discrimination training have on

Ch. 12: Conditional Discrimination and Stimulus Class

- Discrimination may be effective under some conditions but not others.

Relations as Stimulus Dimensions

Symbolic Behavior: Equivalence Classes

Higher Order Classes of Behavior

Contingencies Operating on the Sub Classes within Higher Order Classes

Study Guide Chapter 12

1) What is an example of a procedure that shows conditional discrimination?

The untrained relationships in equivalence are sometimes called – emergent relations

Learning set is another potential higer order relationship

4) Define reflexivity, symmetry, and transitivity in terms of the relationship(s) between A,

Chapter 13: Sources of Novel Behavior

Study Guide Chapter 13

1) Define three sources of novel behavior

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