REINFORCEMENT HISTORY - A CONCEPT UNDERUTILIZED IN BEHAVIOR ANALYSTS

Some years ago Underwood (1964) grappled with the problem of explainin g his finding that rate of forgetting was not a function of the rate o f learning but rather seemed to reflect the level of learning achieved . He likened different rates of learning to filling an Erlenmeyer flas k of water at different rates and the process of forgetting to the rat e of evaporation, which in turn is a function of the exposed surface a rea. Since an Erlenmeyer flask is cone-shaped, the surface area become s smaller as the flask is filled, thus the greater the amount of learn ing achieved, or water added, the less the rate of evaporation indepen dent of how quickly or slowly the flask was filled. I give this exampl e because it is such a clear description of history kept simple, in th e psychological process of learning and forgetting. Indeed it is as si mple as Charles Dickens' description of how students ate to be taught, that is, by considering them to be ''little vessels ... ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to th e brim'' (Dickens, 1961, p. 12). The object of this paper is to show h ow our neglect in specifying the history of reinforcement and other be havior analytic concepts has resulted in our ceding much of our field to cognitive psychologists even though our knowledge of conditioning e nables us to study it more thoroughly than they can. Copyright (C) 199 6 Elsevier Science Ltd