Operação estabelecedora condicionada substituta: uma demonstração experimental / Surrogate conditioned establishing operation: an experimental demonstration

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2008

RESUMO

Establishing operations (EO`s) are environmental events defined by two of their effects: establishing the effect of a consequence as a reinforcement or a punisher and altering the frequency of any response that, in the past, was related to it. The EO`s are divided in unconditioned and conditioned, being the last ones classified in three different types: surrogate CEO, reflexive CEO, transitive CEO. A lot has recently been published about the importance of establishing operations to Applied Behavior Analysis. However, there is little basic research in the field, especially concerning the surrogate CEO. This work had the objective of demonstrating this EO empirically. For this purpose, experiments were conducted using 8 male Wistar rats, a standard equipment (living cages and experimental box) and a mechanism with seven light spots that would supposedly function as the surrogate CEO. The experimental design involved five phases: (1) determining the subjects` free feeding weight; (2) reducing the amount of food the subjects could eat per day until they would remain at about 80% to 85% of their free feeding weight, concomitantly with the procedure to establish the surrogate CEO; (3) shaping the bar press response and implementing the VI 60 s schedule; (4) exposing the subjects to three different deprivation conditions (named minimum, moderate and maximum); (5) testing the surrogate CEO with the six subjects that had completed phase 4. The main results obtained were: a) in relation to the exposure of the subjects to the three different deprivation conditions, the subjects` weights and number of responses emitted per session were affected by them. In general, along the minimum deprivation condition, higher weights and lower number of responses per session were obtained, in comparison with the other conditions; whereas along the maximum deprivation condition, lower weights and higher number of responses were emitted; finally, along the moderate deprivation condition, intermediate results between the two other conditions were obtained; b) in relation to the surrogate CEO tests, data suggest that, at least for four of the six subjects, the mechanism showed (in some of the configurations used in the experimental sessions) effects of a surrogate conditioned establishing operation, which are more visible in lower deprivation conditions (the minimum and moderation conditions)

ASSUNTO(S)

peso operant performance condições de privação operação estabelecedora desempenho operante operação estabelecedora condicionada substituta surrogate conditioned establishing operation weight establishing operation comportamento operante psicologia experimental avaliacao do comportamento deprivation conditions

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