The research proposed here forms a link in a long-term effect to discover the controlling mechanisms underlying adaptive, non- linguistic behavior of animals and humans. The research focuses on molecular relations between reinforcement and the local temporal structures of stimuli and of behavior, on the tentative assumption that such molecular relations are more clearly diagnostic of causal mechanisms than are the more commonly studied purely molar relations. It is proposed to develop and refine new empirical methods by means of which the molecular structure of behavior can be better studied. The experiments deal chiefly with sequential and spatial quantitative ill-defined or fuzzy concepts, i.e., concepts exemplars of which have no defining features. Experiments involve intuitive statistical inference, self-terminating sampling, and non-verbal self reports of a subject's own performance. The experiments are designed to diagnose ways to improve a computer-simulatic computational- processing model (AL) based on assumptions about encoding of stimuli, short-term forgetting, the acquisition of associative knowledge and the translation of knowledge into behavior and it is proposed to demonstrate the generality of molecular analyses by assimilating both the empirical outcomes to be produced by the proposed research and a wide array of other behavioral phenomena. Application of AL to the data from the experiments could provide a preliminary account of the cognitive mechanisms underlying intuitive statistical inferences. Application of AL to already published literature could provide an integrated, cognitive account of phenomena as diverse as the attribution of causality, timing, preference, behavior-reinforcement dynamics, the effects of multiple sources of reinforcement, short-term memory for sequential order, self-control, and dissociations between various performances and nonverbal self reports of those performances.
| Shimp, C P; Fremouw, T; Ingebritsen, L M et al. (1994) Molar function depends on molecular structure of behavior. J Exp Psychol Anim Behav Process 20:96-107 |
| Shimp, C P; Childers, L J; Hightower, F A (1990) Local patterns in human operant behavior and a behaving model to interrelate animal and human performances. J Exp Psychol Anim Behav Process 16:200-12 |
| Shimp, C P; Sabulsky, S L; Childers, L J (1989) Preference for starting and finishing behavior patterns. J Exp Anal Behav 52:341-52 |
