A relação entre comportamento supersticioso e estímulo reforçador condicionado: uma replicação sistemática de Lee (1996)

• Autor(a) principal: Santos, Ghoeber Morales dos
• Data de Publicação: 2006
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da PUC_SP
• Texto Completo: https://tede2.pucsp.br/handle/handle/16775
• topic: comportamento supersticioso; estímulos reforçadores condicionados; alterações ambientais independentes da resposta.; Avaliacao do comportamento; superstitious behavior; conditioned reinforcer; response-independent environmental changes.; CNPQ::CIENCIAS HUMANAS::PSICOLOGIA::PSICOLOGIA EXPERIMENTAL

Superstitious behavior was first studied in 1948 by B.F. Skinner, whose work Superstition in the Pigeon was the startpoint to a series of research on this subject. This study was carried out to systematically replicate Lee (1996) and investigate if systematic changes in icon display on a computer screen could work as conditioned reinforcer to the response of clicking a mouse button in the same location on the screen. This could contribute to the standard set of superstitious responses observed by Lee (1996). The participants task was to obtain the highest scores possible by depressing the Up arrow key as soon as the five icons displayed on screen matched. The participants were not told what to do obtain the match. Icon change depended on the response of clicking the mouse button despite cursor location. The experiment had three phases. The participants task during phase 1 was to change the icon display on the computer screen by clicking the mouse button. The icon display changed according to a ratio schedule randomly selected from an array that ranged from 1:1 to 5:1, without repetitions, in which the first number is the number of clicks on the mouse button and the second number is an icon change. Therefore, n clicks on the mouse button (1 to 5) were necessary to produce changes in the icon display. The first four were related to icon display only. An icon match was always seen after the fifth click. During phase 2, following n clicks (that ranged from 1 to 30 randomly, without any repetitions) in which icon change was not observed, an FR 5 schedule controlled icon change the first four clicks changed icon display, although icons remained the same, and the fifth click produced icon match. In phase 3, the n value was randomly selected by the computer and performing this n clicks produced icon match. Twelve participants were divided into two groups: Group 1, with eight participants, went through phases 1, 2 and 3, while Group 2, with four participants, went through phases 3, 2 and 1. Two types of superstitious responses were identified: (1) clicking the mouse button on icons or in any other place on the screen that did not have icons and (2) location changes or location repetitions after a failure to change the icons and after icons changes. The majority of participants in Group 1 clicked over location zones that displayed the icons, as if these zones controlled icon match, while in Group 2 the zones that did not display icons were more likely to be used by participants. The sequence of phases to which each group of participants was exposed seems to have influenced the location of clicks. The different possibilities for initial n values in phases 1 and 3 seem to have influenced the occurrence of different performances. It was also observed that the majority of participants changed the location of the click after an icon change, despite the fact that icon match did not depend on changing click location. The pattern of superstitious responses observed by Lee (1996) - changing location after a failure to change the icons and repeating the same location after a click followed by an icon change - was not observed in this experiment. However, the four systematic changes in icon display right before icon match seem to have worked as conditioned reinforcers to clicking in the same location that was followed by the first change in icon display, as noticed in the performance of some participants during phase 2. The introduction of phase 3 did not prevent superstitious responses. In this phase, these responses seemed to be controlled only by icon match, and not by changes in icon display and icon match, as observed in phase 2