ABSTRACT
The development of imitative repertoires, including the unreinforced imitation of probe demonstrations, could be accounted for by the effects of conditioned reinforcement. The progressive development of imitation was apparent in other aspects of the data as well. One of the most effective ways of giving a stimulus a reinforcing function is to make it discriminative with respect to reinforcement. In these applications, the stimulus class of behavioral similarity was, in numerous examples, made discriminative with respect to positive reinforcement. The purpose of the initial training procedures was to program reinforcement, in as many and diverse ways as practical, whenever a subject's behavior was topographically similar to that demonstrated by the experimenter. The responses served as probes for the developing imitative nature of the subject's repertoire. After the probe phase, and after stable performances of reinforced and unreinforced imitative responses were established, non-reinforcement of all imitative behavior was programmed.
