ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns learned behavior, but start by considering some aspects of stimulus perception. Stimulus control is a characteristic not only of human behavior but also that of many other animal species. Behavior comes under the control of many aspects of the environment, in that the probability of a response class changes markedly when certain stimuli are presented. Various factors determine whether a particular stimulus dimension will acquire control over behavior. Among these are discrimination training, and the salience of that stimulus dimension. Pavlov showed that if two stimuli that varied in one dimension were used as Conditioned Stimulus with food (CS+), which was followed by the unconditioned stimulus (US), and Conditioned Stimulus without food (CS-), which was not, then the important phenomena of generalization and discrimination could both be demonstrated. Operant discrimination training occurs when a negative discriminative stimulus, SΔ is provided as well as discriminative stimulus (SD).
