WHY REINFORCEMENT IS ILLUSORY |
D. Rumbaugh1,2 and D. A. Washburn2
1Great Ape Trust, 4200 S.E. 44th Ave., Des Moines, IA, 50320, USA, 2Language Research Center and Deparment of Psychology, Georgia State University |
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| The concept of reinforcement has played a very important role in the history of learning and behavior. In its most basic definition, it strengthens an association between a stimulus and a response. In its most basic operation, a reinforcer is something given or vended to a subject contingent upon their behavior. Its attraction has been that it posits nothing by way of sentience, awareness, understanding, or cognition of/by the subject. It is to be understood in the history of psychology as useful in the formulation of an empty-organism, even empty-headed psychology of learning and behavior; however, given solid evidence of animals' complex cognitive skills and potentials, the traditional concept of reinforcement is no longer sufficient to understand learning and behavior. Accordingly, the concept should be supplanted with one or more other terms -- reward, pay for work done, resource garnered by foraging/taking, social credit, and so on. Future use of the terms reinforcement and reinforcer should be limited to describing the operations whereby a researcher controls the consequences for the subject's responses or behaviors -- not as requisites to learning. A revised interpretation of reinforcement and learning should emphasize the salience and the general sharing of response-eliciting properties among stimuli that occur together with high reliability across time. |
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