4 - Survival, durability, and transfer of persistence

Summary

As will be apparent in this chapter, our work has been greatly influenced by an experiment performed some time ago, independently, by Theios (1962) and Jenkins (1962). Theios, using a runway apparatus and rats as subjects, and Jenkins, working with pigeons in a discrete-trial Skinner box, demonstrated that when one group of subjects acquires a response under CRF and another group under PRF conditions, and then both are exposed to CRF training before an extinction phase, the persistence acquired in PRF acquisition carries through the block of CRF trials, interpolated between acquisition and extinction, so that the PREE survives the common interpolated experience. This was an important finding for what I now call “dispositional learning” because, at the time, it contraindicated hypotheses based on expectancy (Humphreys, 1939b) or discrimination (Bitterman, Fedderson, & Tyler, 1953; Mowrer & Jones, 1945) as necessary for the explanation of the PREE. These two hypotheses are similar in that both interpret the PREE as being a more short-term effect, relating to a detectable change in percentage of reinforcement from the end of acquisition to the beginning of extinction, in the first case in terms of the degree of disconfirmation of an expectancy and in the second case in terms of the discriminability of that change. A related position accounts for the PREE in terms of degree of generalization decrement, from acquisition to extinction, of the sequential effects of carried-over stimulation from reinforced and nonreinforced trials (Capaldi, 1966).