Revised on 3/29/14
In Ch. 7 (p. 128) Malott discusses the three ways to define a response class. Skinner pointed out that no one ever performs a response/behavior the same way twice. Opening the refrigerator with your right hand is basically the same behavior as opening it with your left hand, even though they're obviously different too. But because they're more similar in important ways than they are different, they're considered members of the same response class. So a response class is a collection of similar behaviors.
What Malott does for us in Ch. 7 is to explain the three ways in which the members of a response class can be similar to each other. If two or more responses are similar in one or more of these ways, then they're members of the same response class.
(1) First, behaviors can be similar on one or more response dimensions. A response dimension is a physical property of a response. So this means that responses may be members of the same response class because they're physically similar.
(2) Behaviors can also be similar because they share the effects of reinforcement or punishment. That means that if one member of a response class is reinforced or punished, and its frequency subsequently changes, the frequency of the other members of the response class will also change in the same direction, even though they haven't been directly reinforced or punished. An implication of this is that if reinforcing or punishing a behavior changes its frequency, and the frequency of another behavior also changes in the same way, that's an indication that the two behaviors are members of the same response class.
(3) Behaviors can also be similar because they serve the same function or produce the same outcome. That means that if a behavior is followed by a particular reinforcer or aversive stimulus (punisher), then other members of the same response class will also be followed by that reinforcer or punisher. So if two behaviors produce the same reinforcing or punishing consequence, that's an indication that they're members of the same response class. This doesn't prove that they're members of the same response class, but it may suggest that you should investigate further to determine if, in fact, they are.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
What is a response class?
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Principles of Behavior: Ch. 07
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I teach courses in the principles and applications of Behavior Analysis, the science and technology of behavior, which is different from other approaches in psychology in that it takes behavior as a subject matter in its own right, rather than as a tool for studying something else, such as the mind. The main purpose of this blog is to be a supplementary means of communication with students who are taking my courses.
2 comments:
I see what you mean by the two have to be similar but not the same. In 129 the professor lectures from the left then lectures from the right he is still doing the same thing, lecturer but doing it from different angles which makes it different giving a different response.
Similarity among responses is important, but it's not clear cut, and it may be misleading to characterize it as necessarily physical. I'll try to explain:
The "dimensions" of a behavior sample are underdetermined, insofar as any given sample can be parametrically represented in many different ways (by many different sets of orthogonal features). That is not to say that the dimensions do not exist, only that it is in some sense arbitrary which ones are chosen to describe behavior.
Many sorts of dimensions can be chosen. Even something as straightforwardly physical as motion can be relative to different frames of reference.
The similarities among responses may also be more broadly structural, not just "physical." Responses can also be composed out of smaller pieces, as in sequences of actions (or, for that matter, words).
Not all features or feature-sets are equally useful for scientists or applied workers, though.
I believe the Skinnerian strategy - yielding perhaps the best return on analytic effort - would be to identify the responses by their orderly relations to controlling variables such as discriminative stimuli and rate of reinforcement.
This focus on the functional relationship is really what set Skinner apart from his predecessors in a "radical" way.
I think one quite often finds that the response classes defined
in such a way exhibit a coherence which is neither purely arbitrary (the only thing in common being the outcome) nor purely "physical" (the only thing in common being simpler features such as rate or speed or force). Nor are these coherences limited to distinctions which the animal cannot produce or discriminate.
Rather, many natural response classes cohere along lines which are structural and/or relational.
This is discouraging because any choice of dimensions may seem arbitrary, is not guaranteed to show the kind of beautiful order one can get out of (say) peck rates in pigeons, and (not unimportantly) may be hard to collect a lot of data on in a well-controlled and fully automated way.
However, EAB and behavioral science in general will not have a very strong grip on the response class until there are more workers exploring the richness of the response dimensions and digging out the underlying regularities in learning across different sets of response dimensions.
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