Friday, January 19, 2018

January 5, 2018

Dear Reader,

I want to elaborate on the process of learning about two patterns of vocal verbal behavior: Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). Each time someone is introduced to these two categories he or she immediately seems to be having a preference for SVB and an aversion against NVB. Once people understand, and, more importantly, experience the great difference between SVB and NVB, they are in favor of SVB, but repulsed by NVB.

When people are first beginning to take note of the SVB/NVB distinction, they are surprised to find out they all have the exact same preference for SVB and resistance to NVB. This is no coincidence as we are talking about innate or phylogenetic behavior. It is important we recognize that, unknowingly, we have biologically determined patterns of vocal verbal behavior, which may supersede any contingencies of reinforcement that are imposed by a trainer. Stated differently, the SVB/NVB distinction deals with the biological constrains on instrumental learning.

One of the biggest challenges posed by the SVB/NVB distinction is that people want to learn about SVB, but they don’t want to learn about NVB. However, it makes no sense to learn about SVB in the absence of learning about NVB. The only way in which we are going to be able to learn about SVB is if we can overcome our resistance to investigating NVB.

In “Hedonics and the Selective Associations, Biological Constraint on Learning” (2015), Weiss & Panlilio explain Breeland’s (1961) racoon, who wasn’t “acting in accordance with their programmed reinforcement contingency” as “consistent with generally applicable, if more complex, general learning principles”, but they also write: the "...influence ... of...the conditioned motivational state in which the instrumental conditioning was conducted and the motivational state that was conditioned by presentations of the reinforcer must be considered" (Domjan, 1983, p. 264).

If we go back to the problems involved in learning about NVB, we do well to consider NVB as a special case of “problem behavior”. The racoon (Breeland, 1961), who could only with great difficulty be taught to drop tokens into a slot for positive reinforcement, didn’t, of course, all of a sudden make Thorndike’s empirical Law of Effect (1911) obsolete. As Domjan (1983) argues “From this perspective, misbehavior and other apparent biological constraints on learning have strengthened general-process theory by encouraging it to deal functionally with the complete learning situation. Generalizations thus developed are concerned with more detailed features of a learning situation, rather than the simplistic interchangeability of cues, responses and reinforcers.”

Reading this paper makes clear why behaviorists have until now overlooked, and, we should say, due to bias for visual stimuli, over-listened, the two universally occurring response classes: interaction among members of different status in the dominance hierarchy (NVB) and interaction among members of equal status (SVB). Behaviorists haven’t been able to learn anything about NVB and SVB, as it requires attention for “the complete learning situation”, that is, the simultaneous consideration of respondent as well as operant conditioning processes. As Skinner emphasizes mostly operant conditioning, behaviorists are often not very inclined to study the selective association literature. As it turns out, this literature can further explain the SVB/NVB distinction.

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