John Anthony Nevin - US grants

Nontechnical Summary, Nevin J. IBN-9507584 "Resistance to Change, Preference, and the Law of Effect" One of the oldest principles of psychology is the Law of Effect, which states that rewards strengthen the behavior that produces them. However, the relation between the value of a reward and its effectiveness in strengthening behavior remains unclear. Over the past 20 years, PI has interpreted the strength of behavior as the resistance of well-learned behavior to change, and has shown that resistance to change depends directly on the frequency or amount of reward signaled by a distinctive stimulus situation. At the same time, methods for measuring reward value, interpreted as preference between stimulus situations that signal various frequencies or amounts of reward, have become progressively more precise. Both lines of research have led to findings that are quite general across species and situations; however, no research has attempted to measure preference and resistance to change at the same time, in an individual subject, which is necessary to determine how these measures are related to each other. The proposed experiments will study preference and resistance to change in pigeons working for food rewards under a variety of conditions designed to isolate a mathematical expression relating them. That relation will be a quantitative statement of the Law of Effect.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): To effect behavior change, it is not sufficient simply to establish desirable behavior. It is also necessary that the behavior persist after therapy ends, and that it be appropriate to the circumstances of daily life. This entails learning to discriminate relations between situations, behavior, and consequences, and these discriminative processes must also be persistent. This project will explore the persistence of discriminative processes including attention, memory. and sensitivity to consequences. Previous research has found that the resistance to change of simple repeated behavior depends directly on the frequency or magnitude of reward, but there is no systematic information on the role of reward in the resistance to change of discriminative processes. To obtain relevant data, pigeons will be trained on delayed matching to sample and related tasks where food rewards for one of two simultaneously available choice responses are signaled by one of two successive stimuli. Different frequencies of food rewards will he arranged in successive components of experimental sessions. Responding that produces discrimination trials will also be measured. After prolonged training, the resistance to change of response rate and of learned stimulus-behavior and behavior-consequence relations will be evaluated by introducing short-term disruptors. The long-term goal of this project is to determine whether discriminative processes and simple response emission depend similarly on reward conditions. If so, the same behavioral principles that have been successful in establishing durable new behavior can be used to develop persistent discriminative processes in clinical populations.

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): To effect behavior change, it is not sufficient simply to establish desirable behavior in a therapeutic setting. It is also necessary that desirable behavior be persistent in the face of daily challenges after therapy ends. In addition, the behavior must be appropriate to the varying circumstances of daily life, which requires attending to and remembering the relations between situations, actions, and consequences. Our research on this project to date has shown that reinforcing consequences affect the persistence of attention and memory in the same way as simple operant responding. Reinforcement-based teaching methods can improve learning to distinguish among different stimuli in people with developmental disabilities, and can enhance short-term memory in clinical patients with neurological deficits. Reinforcement effects on attending and remembering are also relevant to drug abuse: Drugs are potent reinforcers and therefore increase attention to events associated with drugs and make those occasions more memorable. At the same time, drug reinforcement may make attending to and remembering drug-related events more resistant to change, and those events may in turn occasion further abuse. This project will continue to explore ways in which reinforcement can establish persistent attending and remembering, and evaluate various methods for disrupting control by environmental stimuli. One goal of this project is to develop and test a new quantitative theory of attending and remembering that combines an existing model of discrimination performance with an existing model of behavioral persistence. A second goal is to develop novel experimental methods to evaluate the terms of the model. A third goal is to identify effective methods for increasing or decreasing the strength of attending and remembering in short- term working memory. The basic behavioral processes examined here are central to research and theory on learning and memory. They are also important for understanding the persistence of maladaptive behavior such as seeking and attending to cues that trigger drug abuse, and for establishing desirable discriminations that are remembered accurately and are highly resistant to change. [unreadable] [unreadable]

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Clinical applications of reinforcement-based treatments for problem behavior in persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities reduce the frequency of problem behavior by reinforcing an explicit desirable alternative (DRA), making reinforcers contingent on the absence of problem behavior (DRO), or providing reinforcers independently of responding (NCR). Although these methods can be highly effective in reducing the frequency of problem behavior to low levels within the treatment context, they can also have the perverse effect of increasing the persistence of problem behavior if some aspect of the context is altered or if lapses in treatment integrity occur. This clinically problematic outcome is predicted by behavioral momentum theory, which proposes that the frequency and persistence of behavior are separately determined by response-reinforcer contingencies such as DRA, DRO, or NCR, and by the overall rate of reinforcers obtained in the setting (which is increased by presenting alternative reinforcers according to any contingency). This project will evaluate the extent to which different contingencies for presenting alternative reinforcers (Specific Aim 1) and the rate of alternative reinforcers (Specific Aim 2) contribute to the persistence of problem behavior. In addition, it will develop methods that may reduce the persistence of problem behavior by arranging that desirable alternative behavior is reinforced in a separate setting, elements of which may then be brought into the treatment setting to reduce the frequency of problem behavior (Specific Aim 3), or by making access to that separate setting contingent on the absence of problem behavior (Specific Aim 4). Studies addressing each of these aims will be conducted with animal subjects in controlled experimental conditions modeled on those in which basic research on behavioral momentum originated. These studies will be repeated with children with intellectual and developmental disabilities in translational settings employing arbitrary responses analogous to problem and alternative behavior to ensure applicability of the animal data to the clinical population. Clinical interventions addressing significant problem behavior in children with intellectual and developmental disabilities will apply the most effective methods identified in basic and translational studies. Coordination of these studies within a single research project and the integration of their findings across the full range from basic research to clinical application will contribute importantly to effective treatment.