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Full-Text Articles in Medicine and Health Sciences
An Assessment Of The Role Of Information Inherent In Positive And Aversive Social Reinforcement Employing A Finger Maze Task With Male And Female Subjects And Experimenters, Brian Westley Strutt
An Assessment Of The Role Of Information Inherent In Positive And Aversive Social Reinforcement Employing A Finger Maze Task With Male And Female Subjects And Experimenters, Brian Westley Strutt
Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)
Forty-eight male and 48 female grade 12 high school students were assigned in groups of 8 to a 2 (sex of S X 3 (treatment) X 2 (sex of E) factorial design experiment. Each S was presented with a finger maze task under one of three experimental treatments: censure-nothing with S being told “WRONG” for an incorrect response, nothing for a correct response; reward-nothing, with S being told “CORRECT” for a correct response, nothing for an incorrect response; nothing-nothing, with Ss being told nothing for either a correct or incorrect response. The task required that a binary decision be made …
Shock Intensity And Task Difficulty As Determiners Of Avoidance And Escape Learning In Rats, Arthur Louis
Shock Intensity And Task Difficulty As Determiners Of Avoidance And Escape Learning In Rats, Arthur Louis
Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)
Thirty-six naive female hooded rats were divided randomly into three groups and tested in an instrumental escape and avoidance learning situation involving three degrees of task difficulty. Each group was also randomly subdivided into four subgroups, each of which underwent a different shock intensity level. The purpose of this study was to test the Yorkes-Dodson law which states that (a) there is an optimal level of punishment intensity for any given task (or an inverted-U curve relating shock intensity and performance) and (b) this optimal intensity decreases as task difficulty increases. The results supported (a) but not (b).