Schedules of Reinforcement
What is a Schedule of Reinforcement?
A rule that describes a contingency of reinforcement, those environmental arrangements that determine conditions by which behaviors will produce reinforcement. (Cooper, Heron, and Heward, 2007).
This section will discuss various schedules of reinforcement that can affect the rate at which an organism responds.
Continuous Reinforcement (CRF):
During a schedule of reinforcement each occurrence of the target behavior provides access to the reinforcer. An example of a schedule of continuous reinforcement being utilized would be a therapist who provided praise, attention, etc. each time the child correctly read a sight word or performed a given task correctly.
A rule that describes a contingency of reinforcement, those environmental arrangements that determine conditions by which behaviors will produce reinforcement. (Cooper, Heron, and Heward, 2007).
This section will discuss various schedules of reinforcement that can affect the rate at which an organism responds.
Continuous Reinforcement (CRF):
During a schedule of reinforcement each occurrence of the target behavior provides access to the reinforcer. An example of a schedule of continuous reinforcement being utilized would be a therapist who provided praise, attention, etc. each time the child correctly read a sight word or performed a given task correctly.
Intermittent Schedules of Reinforcement
This schematic helps describe the various intermittent schedules of reinforcement without getting too complicated. For more information on intermittent schedules of reinforcement please refer to the following webpages and research articles:
Variations of Intermittent Schedules of Reinforcement:
Differential reinforcement provides a potential solution for behavior issues correlated with rates of responding. The differential reinforcement of certain rates of behavior is a variation of ratio schedules. During differential reinforcement of particular rates access to the reinforcer is contingent (depends) on responses occurring at a rate that is either higher or lower than a criterion level that is pre-established.
Issues due to Reinforcement Schedules:
Variations of Intermittent Schedules of Reinforcement:
Differential reinforcement provides a potential solution for behavior issues correlated with rates of responding. The differential reinforcement of certain rates of behavior is a variation of ratio schedules. During differential reinforcement of particular rates access to the reinforcer is contingent (depends) on responses occurring at a rate that is either higher or lower than a criterion level that is pre-established.
- Differential Reinforcement of High Rates (DRH): This schedule requires that responses be higher than a predetermined criterion level of responding. This variation of an intermittent schedule results in higher rates of responding by the child.
- Differential Reinforcement of Low Rates (DRL): During this particular schedule responses are reinforced only when they are lower than the criterion level. Differential reinforcement of low rates (DRL) produce low rates of responding.
- Progressive Schedules of Reinforcement: Systematically thins each successive reinforcement opportunity independent of the child's behavior. These schedules of reinforcement are often used to assess reinforcers and for behavioral interventions.
Issues due to Reinforcement Schedules:
- Adjunctive Behaviors/Schedule-Induced Behaviors: Are behaviors that occur independently of schedule control. Some examples include doodling, smoking, idle talking, drinking, etc. Such behaviors are labeled as Adjunctive when the frequency of these behaviors increases as a side effect of other behaviors that are being maintained by a schedule of reinforcement.
- Instructions and environmental aids can interfere with schedule control. In particular, instructions and environmental aids can make children resistant to temporal schedule control.
- Immediate histories of reinforcement schedules can affect performance on the current schedule more than remote past histories.
NOTE: Because positive reinforcement is not only a principle of behavior but also a technique used in behavior analysis the two are intertwined. For this reason, we have only discussed the schedules of reinforcement in this section but more discussion on positive reinforcement as a principle of behavior and as a technique is found under the positive reinforcement tab in the training section of the manual. Additional information can be found in the Applied Behavior Analysis by Cooper, Heward, and Heron (2007) textbook.