HOME
*





Society For Quantitative Analysis Of Behavior
The Society for the Quantitative Analyses of Behavior was founded in 1978 by Michael Lamport Commons and John Anthony Nevin. The first president was Richard J. Herrnstein. In the beginning it was called the Harvard Symposium on Quantitative Analysis of Behavior (HSQAB). This society meets once a year to discuss various topic in quantitative analysis of behavior including: behavioral economics, behavioral momentum, Connectionist systems or neural networks, hyperbolic discounting, foraging, errorless learning, learning and the Rescorla-Wagner model, matching law, Melioration, scalar expectancy, signal detection and stimulus control, connectionism or Neural Networks. Mathematical models and data are presented and discussed. The field is a branch of mathematical psychology. Some papers resulting from the symposium are published as a special issue of the journal ''Behavioural Processes ''Behavioural Processes'' is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal publishing origina ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Michael Commons
Michael Lamport Commons (b. 1939) is a theoretical behavioral scientist and a complex systems scientist. He developed the model of hierarchical complexity. Life and work Michael Lamport Commons was born in 1939 in Los Angeles and grew up in Hollywood. Commons holds two B.A.s from University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), one in mathematics, the other in psychology. He earned his M.A., and M.Phil. and in 1973 received his Ph.D., in psychology from Columbia University. Currently, he is Assistant Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School), and Director of the Dare Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts. His research interest is the quantitative analysis of psychological reality as it develops across the life span. With Francis Asbury Richards, Edward Trudeau, and Alexander Pekker, he developed the model of hierarchical complexity, a mathematical psychology model. He is one of the cofounde ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Matching Law
In operant conditioning, the matching law is a quantitative relationship that holds between the relative rates of response and the relative rates of reinforcement in concurrent schedules of reinforcement. For example, if two response alternatives A and B are offered to an organism, the ratio of response rates to A and B equals the ratio of reinforcements yielded by each response.Poling, A., Edwards, T. L., Weeden, M., & Foster, T. (2011). The matching law. ''Psychological Record'', 61(2), 313-322. This law applies fairly well when non-human subjects are exposed to concurrent variable interval schedules (but see below); its applicability in other situations is less clear, depending on the assumptions made and the details of the experimental situation. The generality of applicability of the matching law is subject of current debate. The matching law can be applied to situations involving a single response maintained by a single schedule of reinforcement if one assumes that alternativ ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Psychology Organizations Based In The United States
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between the natural and social sciences. Psychologists seek an understanding of the emergent properties of brains, linking the discipline to neuroscience. As social scientists, psychologists aim to understand the behavior of individuals and groups.Fernald LD (2008)''Psychology: Six perspectives'' (pp.12–15). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.Hockenbury & Hockenbury. Psychology. Worth Publishers, 2010. Ψ (''psi''), the first letter of the Greek word ''psyche'' from which the term psychology is derived (see below), is commonly associated with the science. A professional practitioner or researcher involved in the discipline is called a psychologist. Some psychologists can also be classified as behavioral or cognitive scientists. Some psycholog ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Behavioural Processes
''Behavioural Processes'' is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal publishing original research papers in the field of ethology. It was established in 1976 and is published by Elsevier. The editors-in-chief are Johan J. Bolhuis (Utrecht University) and Olga Lazareva (Drake University). According to the ''Journal Citation Reports'', the journal has a 2017 impact factor The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as i ... of 1.555. References External links * English-language journals Publications established in 1976 Monthly journals Ethology journals Elsevier academic journals {{Ethology-stub ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Mathematical Psychology
Mathematical psychology is an approach to psychological research that is based on mathematical modeling of perceptual, thought, cognitive and motor processes, and on the establishment of law-like rules that relate quantifiable stimulus characteristics with quantifiable behavior (in practice often constituted by task performance). The mathematical approach is used with the goal of deriving hypotheses that are more exact and thus yield stricter empirical validations. There are five major research areas in mathematical psychology: learning and memory, perception and psychophysics, choice and decision-making, language and thinking, and measurement and scaling. Although psychology, as an independent subject of science, is a more recent discipline than physics, the application of mathematics to psychology has been done in the hope of emulating the success of this approach in the physical sciences, which dates back to at least the seventeenth century. Mathematics in psychology is used e ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Artificial Neural Network
Artificial neural networks (ANNs), usually simply called neural networks (NNs) or neural nets, are computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains. An ANN is based on a collection of connected units or nodes called artificial neurons, which loosely model the neurons in a biological brain. Each connection, like the synapses in a biological brain, can transmit a signal to other neurons. An artificial neuron receives signals then processes them and can signal neurons connected to it. The "signal" at a connection is a real number, and the output of each neuron is computed by some non-linear function of the sum of its inputs. The connections are called ''edges''. Neurons and edges typically have a ''weight'' that adjusts as learning proceeds. The weight increases or decreases the strength of the signal at a connection. Neurons may have a threshold such that a signal is sent only if the aggregate signal crosses that threshold. Typically ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Connectionism
Connectionism refers to both an approach in the field of cognitive science that hopes to explain mental phenomena using artificial neural networks (ANN) and to a wide range of techniques and algorithms using ANNs in the context of artificial intelligence to build more intelligent machines. Connectionism presents a cognitive theory based on simultaneously occurring, distributed signal activity via connections that can be represented numerically, where learning occurs by modifying connection strengths based on experience. Some advantages of the connectionist approach include its applicability to a broad array of functions, structural approximation to biological neurons, low requirements for innate structure, and capacity for graceful degradation. Some disadvantages include the difficulty in deciphering how ANNs process information, or account for the compositionality of mental representations, and a resultant difficulty explaining phenomena at a higher level. The success of deep ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Stimulus Control
In behavioral psychology (or applied behavior analysis), stimulus control is a phenomenon in operant conditioning (also called contingency management) that occurs when an organism behaves in one way in the presence of a given stimulus and another way in its absence. A stimulus that modifies behavior in this manner is either a ''discriminative stimulus'' (Sd) or '' stimulus delta'' (S-delta). Stimulus-based control of behavior occurs when the presence or absence of an Sd or S-delta controls the performance of a particular behavior. For example, the presence of a stop sign (S-delta) at a traffic intersection alerts the driver to stop driving and increases the probability that "braking" behavior will occur. Such behavior is said to be emitted because it does not force the behavior to occur since stimulus control is a direct result of historical reinforcement contingencies, as opposed to reflexive behavior that is said to be elicited through respondent conditioning. Some theorists belie ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Detection Theory
Detection theory or signal detection theory is a means to measure the ability to differentiate between information-bearing patterns (called stimulus in living organisms, signal in machines) and random patterns that distract from the information (called noise, consisting of background stimuli and random activity of the detection machine and of the nervous system of the operator). In the field of electronics, signal recovery is the separation of such patterns from a disguising background. According to the theory, there are a number of determiners of how a detecting system will detect a signal, and where its threshold levels will be. The theory can explain how changing the threshold will affect the ability to discern, often exposing how adapted the system is to the task, purpose or goal at which it is aimed. When the detecting system is a human being, characteristics such as experience, expectations, physiological state (e.g., fatigue) and other factors can affect the threshold app ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Scalar Expectancy
The scalar timing or scalar expectancy theory (SET) is a model of the processes that govern behavior controlled by time. The model posits an internal clock, and particular memory and decision processes. SET is one of the most important models of animal timing behavior. History John Gibbon originally proposed SET to explain the temporally controlled behavior of non-human subjects. He initially used the model to account for a pattern of behavior seen in animals that are being reinforced at fixed-intervals, for example every 2 minutes. An animal that is well trained on such a fixed-interval schedule pauses after each reinforcement and then suddenly starts responding about two-thirds of the way through the new interval. (See operant conditioning) The model explains how the animal's behavior is controlled by time in this manner. Gibbon and others later elaborated the model and applied it to a variety of other timing phenomena. Summary of the model SET assumes that the animal has a clo ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Melioration Theory
Melioration theory in behavioral psychology is a theoretical algorithm that predicts the matching law. Melioration theory is used as an explanation for why an organism makes choices based on the rewards or reinforcers it receives. The principle of melioration states that animals will invest increasing amounts of time and/or effort into whichever alternative is better. To meliorate essentially means to "make better".Mazur, James E. Learning and Behavior (6th ed.) Upper Saddle River NJ: 2006 p. 332-335 Melioration theory accounts for many of the choices that organisms make when presented with two variable interval schedules. Melioration is a form of matching where the subject is constantly shifting its behavior from the poorer reinforcement schedule to the richer reinforcement schedule, until it is spending most of its time at the richest variable interval schedule. By matching, the subject is equalizing the price of the reinforcer they are working for. This is also called hyperbolic ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]