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Cited by 732Neural and Behavioral Psychology StudiesBehavioral and Psychological StudiesNeurotransmitter Receptor Influence on Behavior

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 206 of the 206 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

How adaptive behavior is produced: a perceptual-motivational alternative to response reinforcements

Bindra, Dalbir·1978·Behavioral and Brain Sciences
DOI 10.1017/s0140525x00059380
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Abstract

Abstract The sway that the response-reinforcement framework (Spencer, Thorndike, Hull, Skinner) has held on the behavioral sciences for nearly a hundred years is finally ending. The strength of this framework lay in providing concepts and methods for studying the effects of hedonic (reinforcing) stimuli on the repetition of specified responses acquired in instrumental training situations of various kinds. Its weakness lay in the invalidity of its central assumptions, stimulus-response association and response-reinforcement, which could not deal with motor-equivalence and flexibility (or “intelligence”) in behavior. To the four decades of incisive criticism on particular theoretical and empirical grounds, a more comprehensive challenge to the response-reinforcement framework is now added by the newer ideas about the nature of cognitive, motivational, and response-production processes that have emerged from the work of ethologists, neuroscientists, and cognitive psychologists. An alternative framework, incorporating the newer ideas, is clearly needed. The particular framework proposed here is based on the ideas of perceptual learning of stimulus-stimulus correlations and of a motivational (rather than reinforcing) role of hedonic (incentive) stimuli. According to it, an act is produced when its act-assembly is activated by a pexgo (perceptual representation) of a certain eliciting stimulus complex (ES). When certain eliciting stimuli are correlated with incentive stimuli, they acquire motivational properties that serve to strengthen the pexgos generated by those eliciting stimuli and thereby increase the probability of activation of the corresponding act-assemblies. Motivation thus influences response production, not by directly instigating “existing” responses, but by modulating the strength of pexgos of eliciting stimuli for the succession of acts that comprise a response. Therefore, a response is always constructed afresh on the basis of current perceptions; not even a stable and stereotyped response occurs as a mere activation of a preformed motor program. The topography of any response that emerges is determined by the nature of the motivational state and the momentary spatiotemporal distribution of eliciting stimuli of changing motivational valence. By suggesting that the animal learns the overlapping and nested correlations between the stimulus events that commonly occur in a given situation, and by separating what is learned from the processes of response production, the proposed perceptual-motivational framework seems capable of dealing with the problems of motor equivalence and flexibility in adaptive behavior. Some implications of this approach for further behavioral and brain research on such problems as behavior modification, learning by observation of models, analysis of causality, and search for neural substrates of learning and response production, are outlined.

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Citations

Cites

Research works printed but not linked: 11

  1. Thorndike, 1911, Animal Intelligence
  2. 1959, Cumulative Record
  3. 1950, Psychological Review, 57, 193
  4. Honzik, 1936, The sensory basis ot maze learning in rats, Comparative Psychology Monographs, 13, 113
  5. Arnold, 1969, Nebraska Symposium on Motivation
  6. Logan, 1960, Incentive
  7. Estes, 1969, Reinforcement in human behavior American Scientist, 60, 723
  8. Darwin, 1859, On the origin of species
  9. 1938, The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis
  10. Hinde, 1966, Animal behaviour
  11. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1974, Love and Hate

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Metadata

Authors
Bindra, D.
Affiliations
McGill University (CA)
Corresponding author
Bindra, Dalbir
Venue
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Published
1978-03
Volume
1
Issue
1
Pages
41-52
ISSN
  • 0140-525X (ISSN-L)
  • 1469-1825
DOI
10.1017/s0140525x00059380
OpenAlex
W2007455229
Cited by
732
References
206
Citations by year
2026: 8 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 20 · 2021: 15 · 2020: 61 · 2019: 45 · 2018: 18 · 2017: 6 · 2016: 7 · 2015: 12 · 2014: 12 · 2013: 11 · 2012: 16
FWCI
23.03
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
www.cambridge.org/core/terms (unspecified, 11663 d)
Locations
Behavioral and Brain Sciences (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Behavioral and Psychological Studies
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience › Neurotransmitter Receptor Influence on Behavior
Keywords
perceptual learning, motivation in learning, motor equivalence, motor flexibility, adaptive behavior, stimulus-response associations, behavior modification, observational learning, ethology, cognitive psychology, Thorndike, Hull

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