Comparisons of stimulus learning and response learning in a punishment situation

doi:10.1016/0023-9690(80)90022-3

Learning and Motivation

Volume 11, Issue 1, February 1980, Pages 78-96

https://doi.org/10.1016/0023-9690(80)90022-3 Get rights and content

Abstract

These experiments use a procedure in which a rat is trained to make two topographically distinct responses on a single manipulandum, and then one of the responses is punished. Differential suppression of the punished response is taken as evidence of response learning, whereas the common suppression of both responses is attributed to stimulus learning or to general and nonassociative factors. Thus, this procedure begins the experimental separation of animals learning about the consequences of their behavior and animals learning what happens in a particular environment. A further separation is effected by using two such manipulanda; this procedure begins to distinguish between stimulus learning about the manipulandum and the more gereral factors that cause suppression. Some parameters affecting the relative importance of stimulus learning and response learning are examined.

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To determine whether the punishment of a discriminated operant behavior has effects that are specific to the punished response, rats were reinforced for performing two different instrumental responses (lever pressing and chain pulling) in the presence of a single discriminative stimulus (S). They were then either punished with mild footshock for performing one of the responses (R1) in S, or they received the same shocks in a noncontingent manner while performing R1 in S (i.e., a yoked control). In final tests of both R1 and R2 in S, the punished rats were more suppressed to R1 than R2, but the yoked rats were not. The results extend previous results with extinction rather than punishment learning (Bouton, Trask, & Carranza-Jasso, 2016) and support a larger parallel between extinction and punishment of both free-operant and discriminated-operant responding. Punishment is like extinction in creating a response-specific inhibition of either free or discriminated operant behavior.
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Learning to stop responding is an important process that allows behavior to adapt to a changing and variable environment. This article reviews recent research in this laboratory and others that has studied how animals learn to stop responding in operant extinction, punishment, and feature-negative learning. Extinction and punishment are shown to be similar in two fundamental ways. First, the response-suppressing effects of both are highly context-specific. Second, the response-suppressing effects of both can be remarkably response-specific: Inhibition of one response transfers little to other responses. Learning to inhibit the response so specifically may result from the correction of “response error,” the difference between the level of responding and what the current reinforcer supports. In contrast, the inhibition of responding that develops in feature-negative learning, where the response is reinforced during one discriminative stimulus (A) but not in a compound of A and stimulus B, is less response-specific: The inhibition of responding by stimulus B transfers and inhibits a second response, especially if the second response has itself been inhibited before. The results thus indicate both response-specific and response-general forms of behavioral inhibition. One possibility is that response-specific inhibition is learned when the circumstances encourage the organism to pay attention to the response—to what it is actually doing—as behavioral suppression is learned.
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It has been hypothesized that compulsive drug use is associated with a dominant habit system that persists under conditions that should encourage a transition back to goal-direction (Ostlund and Balleine, 2008). For example, rats overtrained for sucrose responding are insensitive to lithium chloride-induced devaluation of outcome when tested under extinction conditions, but rapidly reduce responding when the devalued sucrose outcome is actually delivered (Adams, 1982; Bolles et al., 1980; Ostlund and Balleine, 2008). In contrast, rats with DMS or BLA lesions are insensitive to devaluation, even when the devalued outcome is delivered (Balleine et al., 2003; Ostlund and Balleine, 2008).
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Or put more plainly, in the punishment-resistant rats the mild shock is not salient enough to learn that their action is responsible for the negative outcome. An alternative explanation based on Bolles et al. (1980) is that responding in the third punishment session can be expected to be controlled by R-O associations. Interestingly, when observing our rats, we often noticed an ‘approach-retreat/avoidance’ behavioural pattern, where the rat would place its forepaw on the lever but return to the alcohol receptacle without pressing.
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Under instrumental control, the value of an action is learned as result of an individual’s experiences of the outcomes contingent on that action. The classic example of this is the lever press of an experimental rat (Bolles et al., 1980). In Rolls’ definition, when a food pellet is delivered to the rat, an emotion occurs, and this emotion updates the value (i.e. the expected value for future choice situations) of the lever pressing action.
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^☆: Supported by a research grant from the National Science Foundation.

^☆☆: Reprints are not available.

¹: R. Holtz is now at the University of Southern California.

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Comparisons of stimulus learning and response learning in a punishment situation☆,☆☆

Abstract

Learning and Motivation

Learning and Motivation

Learning and Motivation

Some effects of two intermittent schedules of immediate and non-immediate punishment

Journal of Psychology

How adaptive behavior is produced: A perceptual-motivational alternative to response-reinforcement

The Behavioral and Brain Sciences

Reinforcement, expectancy and learning

Psychological Review

Theory of motivation

Auto-shaping of the pigeon's key-peck

Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior

Response suppression

Contingency between response and an aversive event in the rat

Journal of Comparative and Psysiological Psychology

Punishment: Method and theory

Psychological Review