emit = (emp, bt) to give an operant response A vacuum activity may be spoken of as emitted. Many psychologists are most unhappy with this word, but still accept the distinction between a response that is elicited by a stimulus presented by the experimenter and one that "just occurs" as a useful one for communication. See also spontaneous behavior.
emotion = 1. (th, bt) a generic name for states of the animal in which a wide variety of responses exhibit lowered response-strengths not attributable to satiation or extinction. The depressed rate of response observed during the course of extinction following regular reinforcement and during conditioned suppression, for example, are classified as defining emotion. =2. (th, bt) an intervening variable having some of the properties of D (drive) in some versions of Hullian theory (2). = 3. (con) a broad, ill-defined or indefinable class of behavior based upon the colloquial use of the word, emotion. The class seems as meaningless for human beings as for subhuman animals. A pretheoretical notion, it has played some role in the identification of emotional behavior. The concepts of emotion bear disappointingly little reference to the empirical concept of emotional behavior. Many who use the latter dispense with the former. Cf. emotional behavior.
engram = (th) a hypothetical neural locus, structure, or persistent activity, presumably anatomically or physiologically identifiable, that plays the same role for the explanation of learned behavior that center does for species-specific behavior. What Lashley couldn't find (26), and perhaps Penfield did (21).
error = (emp, bt) any response, or set of responses collectively taken, whose occurrence delays the appearance of the response chosen to be reinforced. Errors may not be practicably subject to measurement, as in the case of trial-and-error learning; or they may, in some situations, be more fully specified and hence become enumerable, as in the case of some superstitions and of entry into blind alleys in maze learning.
error/anticipatory = (emp, bt) a class of errors in the acquisition of behavior chains, in which the error is the occurrcnce of a response earlier in the chain than the position in which it would lead to reinforcement.
error/perseverative = (emp, bt) a class of errors in the acquisition of behavior chains, in which the error is the occurrence of a response in a serial position following that in which it would lead to reinforcement.
ethologist = 1. (emp) a behaviorist (1.) who, typically, has been trained in zoology, usually studies the behavior of insects, fishes, and birds more often than that of mammals and other groups, and makes use of much of the system of terms labeled eth in this glossary. =2. (emp) a student of comparative behavior. =3. (emp, eth) a behaviorist (1.) who likes his animals.
excitation = (th) a hypothetical state of the animal used in various ways to account for the occurrence of a response and presumed to be great when response magnitude is large. Sometimes dressed up by the addition of suggestions about nerve impulses, etc.
excitatory potential = (th, bt) Hull's 8Er (16). A hypothetical state variable, defined mathematically, that incorporates the combined effects on response magnitude of such excitatory variables as stimulation and drive.
excitatory potential/effective = (th, bt) Hull's 8Er (16). A hypothetical state variable quantitatively embodying the joint effects of excitatory potential and the reactive inhibitions on response magnitude. Drive (3.) is almost synonymous. Momentary effective excitatory potential (8Er) incorporates a variability concept.
exhaustion (of action-specific energy, or of specific action potential) = (th, eth) a hypothetical process postulated to account for the data of adaptation or habituation of a species-specific response. The occurrence of a response is presumed to drain off or consume a certain quantity of this "energy," thus raising the threshold and hence reducing the frequency and magnitude of the response thereafter.
expect = (P, bt) If one does not "intuitively know"' what expect means, one is lost. The writer has been unable to find a definition of any type that has enabled him to use the term in a systematic fashion, except the following: "If x is deprived of food and z has been trained on path P and path P is now blocked and there are other paths which lead away from path P, one of which points directly to location L, then x runs down the path that points directly to location L =x expects food at location L" (33). Expectancy is the noun; presumably it is what one has when one expects. = 2. (con) to behave as if making a probability judgment. The difficulty of arriving at an empirical or theoretical definition of "expect" and of "expectancy" that is other than trivial may explain why many experimental behavior theorists find the concept of limited value, even though sonic consider it equivalent in explanatory power" to habit-strength 8Hr.
extinction/experimental = (emp, bt) the progressive decrements in the magnitude or relative frequency of a previously conditioned, response resulting from the procedure of omitting reinforcement following or accompanying the occurrence of the response, when other variables are held constant.
extinction/resistance to = (emp, bt) the number of instances of a conditioned response that occurs during experimental extinction before the conditioned response reaches sonic predetermined criterion of low response-strength. Such criteria are usually chosen on the basis of previous experimental results so that little further extinction would be expected if the procedure were continued, i.e., so that extinction has approached an asymptotic value. Criteria that have been employed in free operant conditioning include: return of the rate to the operant level, failure to respond within five minutes of the preceding response, and failure to respond within five minutes of onset of the discriminative stimulus. In classical conditioning, failure to respond to the conditional stimulus in a specified time is a typical criterion. Resistance to extinction is an important measure of strength of conditioning and forms the basis of Skinner's concept of the reflex reserve.
extinguish = 1. (emp, bt) to omit reinforcement of a response sufficiently often that a decrement in response-strength is observed. Usage often restricts this word to cases where the response returns to the magnitude or relative frequency observed before conditioning began. = 2. (emp, bt) with reference to a response, to decrease in magnitude as a function of the omission of reinforcement. Extinguish is both a transitive and an intransitive verb. By definition 1., the experimenter extinguishes a response; by definition 2., the response extinguishes.