Variables Affecting Incidence of Self Reinforcement

Abstract

Self reinforcement (sr), the administration of reinforcing stimuli by S to himself without external constraints, was investigated with regard to the effect of task and type of reinforcing stimulus. Each S received the same five tasks during each of two sessions. The tasks all involved a response followed by an sr (3 groups: with sr light, sr chips, sr rating scale). Two of the tasks were relatively unstructured; a second pair were less ambiguous and included a model's response to guide S; and the fifth was a verbal discrimination task learned to a 50% criterion. The results indicated: no consistent differences in rate of sr for the three types of reinforcing stimuli; increases in sr in Session 2 for tasks which showed a practice effect; rate of sr related to task with more sr when S agreed with the model's responses or the model was correct; and significant inter-session correlations on rate of sr for all tasks.