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| Paying Attention (or Not) to What You Are Doing: Goal Direction, Inhibition, and Habit in Operant Learning |
| Sunday, May 25, 2025 |
| 8:00 AM–8:50 AM |
| Marriott Marquis, M2 Level, Marquis Salon 6 |
| Area: SCI; Domain: Basic Research |
| Chair: Jonathan W. Pinkston (University of Kansas) |
| CE Instructor: Jonathan W. Pinkston, Ph.D. |
| Presenting Author: MARK BOUTON (University of Vermont) |
| Abstract: This talk will merge two threads of research that begin to suggest that attention to one's behavior may be an important (though usually overlooked) dimension of operant learning. In one thread, we studied how operants can transition from goal-directed to habitual after extended training and practice. The results suggest that the conversion to habit is not permanent, and that habit develops under conditions that theories of associative learning suggest might encourage the animal to pay less attention to the response. In another thread, we studied several discriminated operant paradigms in which organisms learn to stop performing the response. In extinction and punishment, the animal learns to stop performing the specific response; inhibition does not generalize to other behaviors. In contrast, in feature-negative learning, the organism learns a type of inhibition that generalizes across different responses. Consistent again with theories of attention and associative learning, there may be more reason to pay attention to the response in extinction and punishment than in feature-negative learning. Attention to a behavior may be driven by prior learning and recent prediction error. |
| Instruction Level: Intermediate |
| Target Audience: Researchers and professionals interested in learning, the development of habits, and response inhibition. |
Learning Objectives: 1. Distinguish between operants that are goal directed vs. habitual
2. Distinguish between situations in which inhibition is response-specific vs. response-general
3. Think about the role of one's attention to behavior during operant learning |
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| MARK BOUTON (University of Vermont) |
 Mark E. Bouton received his BA from Williams College and his PhD from the University of Washington (Seattle). He is currently University Distinguished Professor and Robert B. Lawson Green and Gold Professor of Psychology Emeritus at the University of Vermont, where he has held appointments since 1980. He has done research on the effects of context on conditioning and learning, with an emphasis on behavior change (including extinction, punishment, and the transition of operant behavior from goal-directed to habitual), for over four decades. His research was continuously funded by grants from NSF or NIH between 1981 and 2023. He has received a number of awards, including the Gantt Medal from the Pavlovian Society and the Quad-L Award from the University of New Mexico, and he is a Fellow of several organizations, including the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Eastern Psychological Association, of which he is a past president. He is the author of a textbook on learning and behavior theory [Learning and behavior: A contemporary synthesis (2nd ed.)], published in 2016 by Sinauer Associates, an imprint of Oxford University Press. |
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