9 - Summing up: steps in the psychobiological study of related behavioral effects

Summary

In Table 1.2 (p. 11), I outlined a six-step strategy that might be followed in an attempt to understand the development of what I have called dispositional learning, as it is studied in the context of the reward-schedule effects. Let us sum up by returning briefly to this strategy and asking to what extent it can be said to have been followed in this book.

Step 1: Observe a number of related effects

The observation and description of a family of related behavioral effects make up a large part of Chapters 3 and 5, are a basis for the developmental work in Chapter 7, and are a feature of the Appendix. The important feature of these reward-schedule effects is that all of them are manipulations of reward and nonreward (or reduced or delayed reward) in some kind of sequence, each of them different from all the others. They are then a family of related effects in this sense, but perhaps more important, also in the sense that each of them is a kind of learning that combines simple classical and instrumental conditioning, that involves many experiences or “trials,” and that governs long-term tendencies or dispositions – for example, to approach or avoid, to persist or desist.

Step 2: Develop a conceptualization of the effects

These effects (including discrimination learning) are conceptualized in terms of the body of empirical constructs that comprise frustration theory, and this is the principal subject matter of Chapters 3 and 5.