🚀 go-pugleaf

[From Richard Kennaway (990507.1439 BST)]

>[From Fred Nickols (990505.1740 EDT)] --
>>Herrnstein's matching law, in its general form, can be expressed in the
>>following equation:
>>
>>Pr(A) = k( Ra/Ra+Re )
>>
>>Where
>>
>>Pr(A) = probability of behavioral response A
>>k = highest # of possible behavioral responses available (total # of
>responses)
>>Ra = Reinforcement experienced for response A
>>Re = Reinforcement experienced for extraneous behavior (behavior other
>>than the response of interest)

I'm not clear on what these mean.  Assuming an experiment involving
lever-pressing to get food-pellets, with each lever yielding identical
pellets, is Ra the rate of delivery of pellets per unit time, or per press?

I think Bill's analysis in [(990506.1225 MDT)] took it as per unit time (in
which case the matching law makes no sense -- Ra/rA is pellets per unit
time/presses per unit time = pellets per press, a property of the lever
independent of the rat).

What's said later in the article suggests Ra is pellets per press.  In that
case, Ra/rA has no particular physical interpretation.  Ra/rA = Re/rE is of
course still a mathematically equivalent way of writing the matching law.

-- Richard Kennaway, jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk, http://www.sys.uea.ac.uk/~jrk/
   School of Information Systems, Univ. of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K.