IBN-9408022 Killeen Abstract It is indisputable that rewards and punishments change behavior, but less certain is just what behavior they affect; just how is "credit" (or blame) allocated to the stream of prior behavior? Dr. Killeen posits that in order to be reinforceable, a behavior (response) must be in short-term memory (STM) along with the incentive that rewards it. Because this memory fades over time, more than just the most recent response is reinforceable; the effects of a reward impinge on the previous stream of behavior, with decreasing efficacy as the response-memories age. Dr. Killeen's research will define the shape and extent of this response STM by a "resonance" technique in which the correct characterization of the memory window is signaled by a maximum in learning rate. There are many implications of this theory and its perspective: It changes our understanding of how reinforcement schedules affect behavior, provides a new model for temporal effects in classical conditioning, reopens questions of chunking and automatization, clarifies how incentives may at the same time reinforce a response and erase memory of that response, and provides a new approach to the classic problem of response units. The results of the research should help to significantly improve training techniques; provide independent indices of memory, motivation, and response facility; and reduce the plethora of scheduling techniques to a concise and predictive mathematical system.
