Applied behavior analysis did not emerge in a vacuum — it rests on decades of basic experimental research identifying the precise, lawful principles governing how consequences shape behavior. PSY8303 returns to this basic-research tradition, the experimental analysis of behavior (EAB), examining the foundational findings that inform applied practice.
Schedules of reinforcement
How the pattern of consequences shapes behavior
- Continuous versus intermittent reinforcement: Continuous reinforcement (every response reinforced) produces rapid learning but is also rapidly extinguished when reinforcement stops; intermittent schedules (only some responses reinforced) produce slower initial learning but substantially greater resistance to extinction
- The four basic schedules: Fixed-ratio (reinforcement after a set number of responses), variable-ratio (reinforcement after a variable, unpredictable number of responses — producing the highest, steadiest response rates and notably resistant to extinction), fixed-interval (reinforcement for the first response after a set time period, producing the characteristic "scalloped" response pattern), and variable-interval (reinforcement for the first response after a variable time period)
- Applied relevance: Understanding schedule effects directly informs applied decisions about how to thin reinforcement schedules over time as a learner's behavior becomes more reliable, while maintaining behavior without continuing intensive continuous reinforcement indefinitely
The matching law and choice behavior
PSY8303 covers Richard Herrnstein's matching law, a quantitative principle describing how organisms allocate behavior across concurrently available reinforcement sources: relative response rate matches relative reinforcement rate across the available options, a finding with substantial empirical support across species and response types. The course examines the matching law's extensions and applications, including its relevance to understanding choice behavior in applied contexts (for example, why a problem behavior that intermittently produces a desired outcome may persist or even increase if it is reinforced more densely, relatively speaking, than an alternative appropriate behavior), connecting directly to the logic underlying differential reinforcement of alternative behavior interventions.
Stimulus control and discrimination
The course examines stimulus control — the degree to which the probability of a response is influenced by the presence of a particular antecedent stimulus — and the discrimination training procedures that establish it (reinforcing a response in the presence of one stimulus while not reinforcing it in the presence of another, gradually narrowing responding to occur selectively in the presence of the reinforced stimulus). PSY8303 covers stimulus generalization (responding similarly to stimuli that resemble the original training stimulus) as the complementary process to discrimination, and the concept of stimulus equivalence and generalization gradients in describing how broadly or narrowly a trained discrimination extends to novel but related stimuli.
Connecting basic research to applied practice
PSY8303 explicitly bridges this basic experimental tradition to applied behavior analysis practice, consistent with the field's foundational three-term framework (basic research in the experimental analysis of behavior, the conceptual analysis of behavior examining behaviorist theory and philosophy, and applied behavior analysis applying these principles to socially significant behavior change) established by Donald Baer, Montrose Wolf, and Todd Risley's foundational 1968 paper defining applied behavior analysis. The course emphasizes that effective applied practice depends on a solid grounding in these basic principles — schedule effects, the matching law, and stimulus control are not merely historical or theoretical content but directly inform real intervention design decisions an effective practitioner must make.
PSY8303 assignments include reinforcement schedule analyses, matching law application papers, and stimulus control case studies
Our behavior analysis specialists deliver experimentally grounded academic support for PSY8303.
Get Help With PSY8303
Reinforcement schedule analyses, matching law application papers, stimulus control case studies, EAB literature reviews.
Place Your OrderView All ServicesRelated courses
Frequently asked questions
This finding — sometimes called the partial reinforcement extinction effect — is one of the most practically important principles PSY8303 covers from the experimental analysis of behavior tradition, precisely because it can seem counterintuitive at first and because misunderstanding it leads directly to a common and consequential error in applied intervention design. The basic finding is well-replicated across the experimental literature: when a behavior has been reinforced continuously (every single occurrence reinforced) and reinforcement is then withdrawn entirely, the behavior tends to extinguish relatively quickly, since the organism's history involves a consistent, reliable correlation between responding and reinforcement, making the abrupt absence of reinforcement readily detectable and the behavior consequently drops off rapidly. When a behavior has instead been reinforced only intermittently (some unpredictable subset of responses reinforced, as in variable-ratio or variable-interval schedules), the same withdrawal of reinforcement produces behavior that persists for substantially longer before extinguishing, sometimes dramatically longer, because the organism's history already involved frequent stretches with no reinforcement interspersed among reinforced responses, making it considerably harder to distinguish "reinforcement has stopped permanently" from "this is simply another unreinforced stretch like many that occurred during training, and reinforcement will likely resume if I keep responding." This principle has substantial, very practical relevance to applied behavior analysis that PSY8303 emphasizes directly: it explains, for example, why a problem behavior maintained by intermittent attention or another intermittent consequence (rather than constant, predictable reinforcement) can be extremely difficult and slow to extinguish even after caregivers or staff begin consistently withholding the reinforcing consequence, since the behavior's prior intermittent reinforcement history has already built in exactly the kind of resistance to extinction the partial reinforcement effect predicts — caregivers attempting extinction-based intervention need to understand that a behavior with an intermittent reinforcement history may show an extinction burst (a temporary increase in the behavior's frequency or intensity) before it declines, and may take considerably longer to extinguish than an analogous continuously reinforced behavior would, information directly relevant to setting realistic expectations and maintaining intervention consistency long enough for extinction to actually take effect rather than abandoning an extinction-based intervention prematurely because it appears not to be working during this resistant early phase.