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LET'S NOT ARGUE ABOUT THIS! Argumentation: The Art of Persuasion By Raymond S. Nickerson. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 350 pp. Paper and ebook, $28. 'Let's not argue about [...]

GOOD, BETTER, BEST: HOW EVOLUTION OPTIMIZES ANATOMY AND ACTION How Animals Work By Knut Schmidt-Neilsen. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972. 120 pp. Paper, $25.28. Optima for Animals By R. [...]

Behavior is a sequence of actions.  Premackian conditioning occurs when one of those actions permits an animal to engage in more biologically potent positive responses—reinforcement—or forces them to engage in less positive (or negative) responses —punishment.  Signals of the transition from one class of actions to another focus the instrumental responses in the first class and inform the contingent responses in the second class.  The signals may be innate (USs) or learned (sign-learning); excitatory (leading to more positive actions) or inhibitory (leading to less positive actions).  The potency of an action has phylogenetic origins, but may be conditioned by proximity to more potent responses, such as consummation of a reinforcer.  With practice instrumental responses may take on increased strength, and in some cases become motivationally autonomous—become habits.  Stimuli or responses that signal the availability of more positive actions may become incentive motivators that animals will approach.  Discriminative stimuli do not have intrinsic value as reinforcers, but only the value derived from the responses that they release.  These forces bend an animal’s trajectory through its stimulus-action-time context into a path that leads more directly to positive actions.  The association of actions (conditioned responses, operants, and observing responses) with actions of different potency (ultimately unconditioned responses or consummatory behavior) is the primary association in Premackian conditioning.  All other types of conditioning may be interpreted as instances of such Premackian conditioning.

The rate of discounting future goods is a crucial factor in intertemporal trade‐offs, upon which depends not only individual well‐being but also that of our planet: How much privation now for a temperate future for our grandchildren? What is the best way to measure how the value of future goods decreases with its delay? The most accurate discount functions involve several covarying parameters, making interpretation equivocal. A universal and robust measure is the area under the discount curve, the AuC. The AuC of a hyperbolic discount function is a logarithmic function of the discount rate, k. The same integral also approximates the area under a hyperboloid function. A simple technique converts each datum into estimates of the discount rate, eliminating rogue data points in the process. These trimmed estimates are converted into areas and tested against data, where they succeed at predicting the AuC and its relation to log(k). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Animal Creativity and Innovation Edited by Allison B. Kaufman and James C. Kaufman. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2015. 538 pp. Cloth, $53; digital, $53. Animal Creativity and Innovation complements [...]

Lecoutre, Lecoutre, and Poitevineau (2010) have provided sophisticated grounding for "p[subscript rep]." Computing it precisely appears, fortunately, no more difficult than doing so approximately. Their analysis will help move predictive inference into the mainstream. Iverson, Wagenmakers, and Lee (2010) have also validated "p[subscript rep]" as a boundary condition in a model-averaging approach. I argue that the boundary is good; that the proper place for their assignment of subjective priors is to update personal belief; and that such assignment has no place in the evaluation of evidence, on which priors should be flat. Maraun and Gabriel (2010) have provided clarification, context, and critique of the derivation of "p[subscript rep]." They concluded that prediction can never be precise without knowledge of population parameters and joint empirical distributions; that nature evolves; that a large initial effect will encourage replication attempts, which are therefore not independent of it; and that there is no substitute for a sustained program of replication attempts--all of which are prudent cautions. If statistics is to be the handmaiden of science and policy, however, rather than history, it ineluctably must speak to the future. The posterior predictive distribution is an underexploited tool in the analyst's kit that will serve that end, and "p[subscript rep]" is but one valid implementation of it.

Goods remote in temporal, spatial, or social distance, or in likelihood, exert less control over our behavior than those more proximate. The decay of influence with distance, of perennial interest to behavioral economists, has had a renaissance in the study of delay discounting. By developing discount functions from marginal utilities, this article provides a framework that resolves several anomalies of intertemporal choice. Utilities are inferred to be power functions of monetary value, delay, and probability. Utility, not value, is discounted, with decisions made by adding the utility of a good to the disutility of a delay or contingency. The theory reduces to standard treatments, such as exponential, hyperbolic and hyperboloid, and exponential-power; naturally predicts magnitude effects and other asymmetries; is consistent with subadditivity, immediacy, and certainty effects; returns conjointly measured determinations of monetary utility and temporal distance functions; and is extensible to other dimensions of distance. (Contains 13 figures, 1 table and 7 footnotes.)

Despite being under challenge for the past 50 years, null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) remains dominant in the scientific field for want of viable alternatives. NHST, along with its significance level "p," is inadequate for most of the uses to which it is put, a flaw that is of particular interest to educational practitioners who too often must use it to sanctify their research. In this article, we review the failure of NHST and propose "p[subscript rep]," the probability of replicating an effect, as a more useful statistic for evaluating research and aiding practical decision making. (Contains 2 tables and 2 figures.)

Twelve pigeons were exposed to negative automaintenance contingencies for 17-27 sessions immediately after brief (14-16 sessions) or extended (168-237 sessions) exposure to positive automaintenance contingencies, or after 4-10 sessions of instrumental training. In all conditions, negative automaintenance contingencies virtually eliminated responding, reducing response rates to an average 1.3 responses per min. This reduction in response rate was validated by a model of transition between early and late response rates that assumed exponential transition of rates from one set of contingencies to the next. The model faithfully reproduced cumulative records, and yielded estimates of terminal rates under negative automaintenance that were close to operant level. (Contains 3 tables, 2 footnotes and 3 figures.)

Rachlin and colleagues laid the groundwork for treating the discounting of probabilistic goods as a variant of the discounting of delayed goods. This approach was seminal for a large body of subsequent research. The present paper finds the original development problematic: In converting probability to delay, the authors incorrectly dropped trial duration. The subsumption of probability by delay is also empirically questionable, as those are different functions of variables such as magnitude of outcome and commodity versus money. A variant of Rachlin's theme treats human discounting studies as psychophysical matching experiments, in which one compound stimulus is adjusted to equal another. It is assumed that a function of amount (its utility) is multiplied by a function of probability (its weight). Conjoint measurement establishes the nature of these functions, yielding a logarithmic transform on amount, and a Prelec function on probability. This model provides a good and parsimonious account of probability discounting in diverse data sets. Variant representations of the data are explored. By inserting the probabilistically discounted utility into the additive utility theory of delay discounting, a general theory of probabilistic intertemporal choice is achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pigeons responded to intermittently reinforced classical conditioning trials with erratic bouts of responding to the conditioned stimulus. Responding depended on whether the prior trial contained a peck, food, or both. A linear persistence-learning model moved pigeons into and out of a response state, and a Weibull distribution for number of within-trial responses governed in-state pecking. Variations of trial and intertrial durations caused correlated changes in rate and probability of responding and in model parameters. A novel prediction--in the protracted absence of food, response rates can plateau above zero--was validated. The model predicted smooth acquisition functions when instantiated with the probability of food but a more accurate jagged learning curve when instantiated with trial-to-trial records of reinforcement. The Skinnerian parameter was dominant only when food could be accelerated or delayed by pecking. These experiments provide a framework for trial-by-trial accounts of conditioning and extinction that increases the information available from the data, permitting such accounts to comment more definitively on complex contemporary models of momentum and conditioning. Keywords: autoshaping, behavioral momentum, classical conditioning, dynamic analyses, instrumental conditioning DOI: 10.1037/a0015626

Goods remote in temporal, spatial, or social distance, or in likelihood, exert less control over our behavior than those more proximate. The decay of influence with distance, of perennial interest to behavioral economists, has had a renaissance in the study of delay discounting. By developing discount functions from marginal utilities, this article provides a framework that resolves several anomalies of intertemporal choice. Utilities are inferred to be power functions of monetary value, delay, and probability. Utility, not value, is discounted, with decisions made by adding the utility of a good to the disutility of a delay or contingency. The theory reduces to standard treatments, such as exponential, hyperbolic and hyperboloid, and exponential-power; naturally predicts magnitude effects and other asymmetries; is consistent with subadditivity, immediacy, and certainty effects; returns conjointly measured determinations of monetary utility and temporal distance functions; and is extensible to other dimensions of distance. Keywords: intertemporal choice, delay discount functions, dynamic inconsistency, magnitude effect, utility

Pigeons' pecks produced grain under progressive ratio (PR) schedules, whose response requirements increased systematically within sessions. Experiment 1 compared arithmetic (AP) and geometric (GP) progressions. Response rates increased as a function of the component ratio requirement, then decreased linearly (AP) or asymptotically (GP). Experiment 2 found the linear decrease in AP rates to be relatively independent of step size. Experiment 3 showed pausing to be controlled by the prior component length, which predicted the differences between PR and regressive ratio schedules found in Experiment 4. When the longest component ratios were signaled by different key colors, rates at moderate ratios increased, demonstrating control by forthcoming context. Models for response rate and pause duration based on Bizo and Killeen (1997) described performance on AP schedules; GP schedules required an additional parameter representing the contextual reinforcement. Keywords: context, fixed ratio, mathematical model, progressive ratio, reinforcement schedules Supplemental materials: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0012497