Association for Behavior Analysis International

Nonhuman (and human) animals interact in a variety of ways in natural settings, patterns of behavior often described by such labels as cooperation, coordination, and aggression. The studies reported in this symposium were designed to study these basic social interactions in laboratory animals using both conventional operant conditioning research methods and combinations of the latter with field research methods. Blosser examined the development of coordination between responding of two pigeons when one nominally controls the reinforcement of the other, but her results reveal in a stark way the reciprocity between teacher and pupil in learning. Carvalho uses conventional reinforcement schedules with the interesting twist that responses of two organisms coordinated with one another are required for reinforcement. Pitts and colleagues further explore the controlling variables of aggressive behavior of an actor toward a co-actor as stimuli associated with the upcoming reinforcement schedule impact aggressive behavior of the actor. The results of each study extend the understanding of basic behavioral processes that operate on individual behavior to that of organisms bound together by social contingencies.

This symposium is suitable for a wide range of audiences, from beginning practitioners to seasoned ones.

Cooperative behavior involves contingencies in which reinforcers for any given cooperating member depend in part on the behavior of other members. Coordinated relations within cooperating groups have been considered a unit of behavior at a social level of selection. This presentation will describe three experiments designed to evaluate if coordinated behaviors are selected by contingencies of reinforcement. A total of nineteen dyads of rats served in thee experiments. In Experiment 1, we investigated effects of Fixed Ratio (FR) schedules on patterns of coordinated responding in two groups with increasing FR requirements. In one group, rats worked on adjoining chambers and only coordinated responses were reinforced. In the second group, rats worked on separated chambers and only individual responding were reinforced. In Experiment 2, we contrasted coordinated performances between two Variable Interval (VI) schedules, one of which reinforcement depended on the behavior of both subjects, but without coordination, and the second in which reinforcers depended on coordinated behaviors. In Experiment 3, dyads are being exposed to Fixed and Variable Interval schedules with individual (independent reinforcement) and coordinated (mutual reinforcement) contingencies. All experiments indicate that coordinated responding changes as function of both consequences programmed for these behaviors and types of reinforcement schedules.