OBJECTIVE Low socioeconomic status (low SES), as defined by income or educational attainment, has been associated with obesity in industrialized nations. Low SES persons have limited resources and may experience food insecurity that increases food reinforcement. Food reinforcement has been positively related to energy intake and weight status, and increased food reinforcement may explain the hi...

In 4 experiments concerning preference for knowing when reinforcement is to be delivered—although that information has no apparent instrumental value—pigeons chose between informative and noninformative stimulus sequences. Following an informative choice, the stimulus was correlated with the prevailing interval before reinforcement; following a noninformative choice, it was not. Strong preferen...

Freeze-dried collagen scaffolds reinforced with hydroxyapatite (HA) are of clinical interest for synthetic bone graft substitutes and tissue engineering scaffolds, but a systematic evaluation of the effects of the HA reinforcement weight fraction and morphology on the mechanical properties is lacking. Therefore, freeze-dried collagen scaffolds were reinforced with either HA whiskers or an equia...

The corrosion of steel reinforcement in an aging highway infrastructure is a major problem currently facing the transportation engineering community, in particular bridge engineers. In the United States, maintenance and replacement costs are measured in billions of dollars. Further, the use of deicing salts has resulted in steady deterioration of bridge decks due to corrosion. These concerns ha...

When partially reproductively isolated species come back into secondary contact, these taxa may diverge in mating preferences and sexual cues to avoid maladaptive hybridization, a process known as reinforcement. This phenomenon often leads to reproductive character displacement (RCD) between sympatric and allopatric populations of reinforcing species that differ in their exposure to hybridizati...

Performance maintained by differential-reinforcement-of-low-rate operant schedules has been found to be sensitive to antidepressant drugs. Tricyclic antidepressants, monoamine oxidase inhibitors and atypical antidepressants reduce response rate and increase reinforcement rate under long differential-reinforcement-of-low-rate schedules. In order to study the neurochemical mechanism by which the ...

We compared the effects of positive reinforcement alone, escape extinction alone, and positive reinforcement with escape extinction in the treatment of the food and fluid refusal of 4 children who had been diagnosed with a pediatric feeding disorder. Consumption did not increase when positive reinforcement was implemented alone. By contrast, consumption increased for all participants when escap...

This paper discusses the role of automatic negative reinforcement in the maintenance of clinical problems. Following a brief introduction to the functional conceptualization of clinical problems and discussion of four classes of reinforcement maintaining clinical problems, the paper suggests that automatic negative reinforcement is an understudied function of problem behaviors. The role of auto...

Reinforcement learning is a very general unsupervised learning mechanism. Due to its generality reinforcement learning does not scale very well for tasks that involve inferring subtasks. In particular when the subtasks are dynamically changing and the environment is adversarial. One of the most challenging reinforcement learning tasks so far has been the 3 to 2 keepaway task in the RoboCup simu...

Most traditional conceptions of reinforcement are based on a simple causal model in which responding is strengthened by the presentation of a reinforcer. I argue that reinforcement is better viewed as the outcome of constraint of a functioning causal system comprised of multiple interrelated causal sequences, complex linkages between causes and effects, and a set of initial conditions. Using a ...