Schedules of Reinforcement¶
Ferster, C. B., & Skinner, B. F. (1957). Schedules of Reinforcement.
Cited by¶
3 citations across 3 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Reinforcement
- Three structural properties distinguish reinforcement from a generic feedback loop. Contingency: the consequence must depend on the action; non-contingent rewards do not reinforce, and the mechanism is sensitive to the difference, which is why a variable-payout machine reinforces play while a freely available reward does not reinforce whatever preceded it. Schedule: the temporal and statistical structure of reinforcement — continuous, fixed-ratio, variable-ratio, fixed-interval, variable-interval — governs the learned behavior's persistence under extinction, with variable schedules producing slower extinction.
This sourceFoundational empirical catalogue of reinforcement schedules and their effects on response rate and extinction resistance.
Supported in partVerified against the work's full text
Ferster and Skinner define the four basic reinforcement schedules; the cached text ends before any extinction comparison between fixed and variable schedules.
“These two possibilities yield four basic schedules: fixed-interval, variable-interval, fixed-ratio, and variable-ratio.”
- Three structural properties distinguish reinforcement from a generic feedback loop. Contingency: the consequence must depend on the action; non-contingent rewards do not reinforce, and the mechanism is sensitive to the difference, which is why a variable-payout machine reinforces play while a freely available reward does not reinforce whatever preceded it. Schedule: the temporal and statistical structure of reinforcement — continuous, fixed-ratio, variable-ratio, fixed-interval, variable-interval — governs the learned behavior's persistence under extinction, with variable schedules producing slower extinction.
Mechanisms¶
- Reinforcement Schedule Design
- It is the applied face of the schedules of reinforcement literature, which established that the pattern of reinforcement, independent of its size, governs how fast a behavior is learned and how stubbornly it persists.
This sourceReinforcement schedules generate different characteristic response patterns and different persistence when reinforcement is withdrawn.
- It is the applied face of the schedules of reinforcement literature, which established that the pattern of reinforcement, independent of its size, governs how fast a behavior is learned and how stubbornly it persists.
- Variable-Reward Schedule Limit
- Its strength is that it addresses the one reward structure other guardrails cannot reach: variable-ratio reinforcement, the schedule that produces the most persistent, extinction-resistant behavior and underlies most engineered compulsion loops.
This sourceShows that variable-ratio reinforcement produces persistent responding with strong resistance to extinction.
- Its strength is that it addresses the one reward structure other guardrails cannot reach: variable-ratio reinforcement, the schedule that produces the most persistent, extinction-resistant behavior and underlies most engineered compulsion loops.
Verification¶
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Links previously used in the corpus¶
Before the registry existed this work was also linked 2 other ways.
- https://archive.org/details/schedulesofreinf0000bfsk ×1
- https://www.bfskinner.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Schedules_of_Reinforcement_PDF.pdf ×1
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