Lashley jumping-stand = a small raised platform from which the animal can remove itself only by falling to the floor, or into a safety net, or by jumping to an easily movable door a few inches away. One, two, or more such doors may be available. The door or doors may have affixed to them discriminative stimuli. Jumping at the "correct" door is reinforced by food or water, to which the animal gains access only by jumping at and through the door.
learn = (emp, bt) to exhibit a change in behavior between two successive exposures to the same environment that cannot be attributed to manipulation of drive operations, alterations in the environment, sensory adaptation, disease, surgical interference, physical trauma, or growth-although the propriety of these exclusions may be questioned. When we say that an animal learns, we are stating at the least that, other things being equal, some behavior now occurs in a situation in which it had not occurred previously, or that the behavior now occurring in a given situation is different from the behavior that occurred on the last occasion the animal was in that situation. The behavior need not change, nor the situation, but the relation between them has changed. For an extremely stimulating, logical treatment of the possibilities, see Haldane (8). See also learning.
learning = 1. (con, bt) a process (2.) or family of processes inferred from the observation that animals learn. The term is a very broad one indeed, so broad that many ethologists as well as behavior theorists question its usefulness, except as a label for a broad class of problems. Learning is not and cannot be an explanatory concept. Learning never explains anything, except in that, by definition, it suggests that certain variables are not operative in a given situation in which behavior is observed to change. =2. (con, bt) a generic term for conditioning. =3. (th) those behavioral processes determining how the genotype is expressed in the phenotype. "The characters of the phenotype are in part determined by the environmental conditions it meets during its life, not only by accidents that happen to it but also in many animals by the nature of the environment in which it is living" (3).
learning/insightful = (th, bt) a process hypothesized specifically to account for the results of experiments in which relatively great and not easily reversible changes in behavior appear between two successive occasions on which the behavior can occur. See insight(1.).
learning/latent = 1. (emp, bt) under some conditions, without either ostensible presentation of a reinforcing stimulus or the occurrence of the response whose strength is altered, changes in the magnitude or relative frequency of a response may be observed. If such changes can be observed, they are termed latent learning. =2. (th, bt) acquisition in the absence of ostensible reinforcement = 3. (th) a process hypothesized to account for the empirical observation above.
learning/perceptual = (con) those cases of acquisition that are interpreted in terms of changes in the perception (2.) or discriminations of the subject.
learning/place = (emp, bt) an animal is repeatedly introduced in the same manner and at the same place into an environment in which it can move towards, and so present to itself, a reinforcing stimulus that is in a fixed geographical position with respect to the whole environment. If on a critical trial the animal is introduced into the environment at a different place, and it then moves towards the reinforcing stimulus directly (and hence shows a series of responses topographically different from those that have been reinforced on the preceding trials), place learning is said to have occurred. Note that the fixed geographical position of the reinforcing stimulus determines a set of discriminative stimuli, movement towards which (however done) is reinforced. Hence, place learning seems to be a special case of response equivalence. According to cognitive theory, the animal has learned "where."
learning/response = 1. (emp, bt) if, in the situation described under place learning, an animal is shown on the critical trial to make responses of the same topography (i.e., the same movements) that he had made during training, irrespective of his location with reference to that of the reinforcing stimulus, it is said that response learning has occurred. Ant. place learning. =2. (th, bt) the doctrine that an animal acquires in learning, not dispositions to move to or towards particular stimulus complexes, but dispositions to make particular movements in the presence of particular stimuli.
learning/serial = (emp, bt) when reinforcement is made contingent upon the occurrence in ordered series of a number of different responses, then, as the number of reinforcements increases, a progressively stereotyped behavior chain may be observed. The acquisition of such behavior chains, measured with reference to the number of errors in the time required for the chain to run off, is termed serial learning. E.g., maze-running, much nonsense-syllable learning, and such demonstration performances as a rat pulling a string that delivers a marble which the rat then picks up and carries to a hole into which it drops it so that water is automatically delivered.
learning/trial-and-error = (emp, bt) operant conditioning as it is observed to occur under conditions where relatively precise experimental controls have not been established. Hence when much irrelevant behavior ("errors") can and does occur and recur. In conditioning by approximation, where the delivery of reinforcing stimuli is under precise experimental control, very few errors have an opportunity to occur, and the "selection out" of the correct response is achieved by the experimenter. It is interesting to contrast trial-and-error learning of bar-pressing by the rat in the Skinner-box with approximation conditioning. In both cases, food is the reinforcing stimulus. In the former, there are long and variable delays between the first occurrence of bar-pressing and the eating of the food. During these delays, much other behavior occurs, a great deal of which will be reinforced and therefore will become conditioned. These responses have been termed superstitions. They must extinguish before the probability of bar-pressing becomes very high since they compete with it. Hence, the course of learning is slow and characterized by the appearance of many irrelevant responses (errors). In approximation conditioning, the animal is first trained to respond to the sound of the food magazine by diving towards it and eating, irrespective of his position at the time the sound occurs. He will then repeat almost immediately whatever response is followed by the sound. In the first case, the process may require several hours in the experimental situation. In the second, it takes only a few (5-10) minutes. In trial-and-error learning, much appetitive behavior is observed, and operants occur freely. The correct response---that is, the response upon which reinforcement (reward) is contingent---decreases in latency and increases in relative frequency only slowly; if it increased rapidly, the older terminology would apply the word insight.
mood = (th, eth) a specific internal state of readiness to discharge a certain complex of behavior patterns. Cf. the old psychological concept of set. This concept is related to Tinbergen's drive or motivation (29). It seems to be dropping out of use.
motivation =1. (con, bt) a rough generic term for the broadest possible class of nonstimulus variables controlling behavior. The most important of these relate to drive (1.), but the term motivation also refers to preferences, values, appetites, set, Aufgabe, and so on and on. The term usually indicates that the controlling variables of a set of behaviors are unknown. Its wide use as an explanatory concept suggests that, for some, ignorance is a virtue---it is admission of ignorance that is the virtue. =2. (th, eth) a concept very similar to Hull's momentary effective excitatory potential, stripped of its precise quantitative statement. That is, motivation is a hypothetical conceptualization of the joint action of all the determiners of behavior, including external and hypothetical internal stimuli, as they converge to determine the magnitude or intensity of a response. Sometimes this concept incorporates statements about nerve impulses.