Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: reward-schedule effects and dispositional learning
- 2 Motivational and associative mechanisms of behavior
- 3 Frustration theory: an overview of its experimental basis
- 4 Survival, durability, and transfer of persistence
- 5 Discrimination learning and prediscrimination effects
- 6 Alternatives and additions to frustration theory
- 7 Ontogeny of dispositional learning and the reward-schedule effects
- 8 Toward a developmental psychobiology of dispositional learning and memory
- 9 Summing up: steps in the psychobiological study of related behavioral effects
- 10 Applications to humans: a recapitulation and an addendum
- Appendix: some phenomena predicted or explained by frustration theory
- References
- Name index
- Subject index
6 - Alternatives and additions to frustration theory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: reward-schedule effects and dispositional learning
- 2 Motivational and associative mechanisms of behavior
- 3 Frustration theory: an overview of its experimental basis
- 4 Survival, durability, and transfer of persistence
- 5 Discrimination learning and prediscrimination effects
- 6 Alternatives and additions to frustration theory
- 7 Ontogeny of dispositional learning and the reward-schedule effects
- 8 Toward a developmental psychobiology of dispositional learning and memory
- 9 Summing up: steps in the psychobiological study of related behavioral effects
- 10 Applications to humans: a recapitulation and an addendum
- Appendix: some phenomena predicted or explained by frustration theory
- References
- Name index
- Subject index
Summary
In Chapters 3, 4, and 5, we addressed the role of frustrative and, generally, of disruptive factors in the acquisition and extinction of responses in a variety of experimental paradigms. The results of these experiments have been discussed in the context of a more general conceptualization of arousal, suppression, persistence, and regression: We have alluded to “generality” and “transfer” of persistence and, in the case of the theoretical and experimental treatment of the role of prediscrimination experience in subsequent discrimination learning, to “resistance to discrimination” as another form of transfer of persistence. In other versions of a discrimination learning experiment, the within-subjects PRF experiment and the DNC experiments, the “generalized PREE” and the emergence in extinction of ritualized behaviors have also reflected, or at least implied, transfer of persistence. If we now look back to the first chapter and to Table 1.2, we can regard Chapters 3, 4, and 5 as a detailed elaboration of the first two of the six steps in the psychobiological study of related behavior effects. I will now undertake a brief general discussion of the theory. This will focus on the breadth of experimental particulars the theory encompasses and will compare its scope with other theories with which it has some explanatory overlap.
In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking (1988) writes the following: “A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements: It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations” (p. 9).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Frustration TheoryAn Analysis of Dispositional Learning and Memory, pp. 122 - 136Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992