Antecedent (behavioral psychology)

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An antecedent is a stimulus that cues an organism to perform a learned behavior. When an organism perceives an antecedent stimulus, it behaves in a way that maximizes reinforcing consequences and minimizes punishing consequences. This might be part of complex, interpersonal communication.

Contents

The definition of antecedent is a preceding event or a cause- in this case it is the event that causes the learned behavior to happen. [1]

Learned behavior and conditioning

Classical vs. Operant Conditioning Classical vs operant conditioning.svg
Classical vs. Operant Conditioning

A learned behavior is one that does not come from instincts- it is created by practice or experiences. [2] Learned behavior can be controlled by two systems- reflective or reflexive, which in turn create cognitive learning and habitual learning. [2] Cognitive learning is influenced directly by the environment and evaluates it in order to acquire a particular behavior. [2] An example of cognitive learning is riding a bike, where the environment (changing of the road path, weather, turns etc.) is constantly changing and you have to adjust to this. [2] Habitual learning is formed through conditioning, whether that is voluntary or involuntary. [2] Classical conditioning denotes when an organism creates reflexes based on past events. [3] A reflex is a stimulus response that happens due to a biological response and is mediated by the nervous system. Habitual learning can then be a result of this reflex happening time after time, as we get used to the stimuli- this is where the antecedent comes in. [3]

Habitual learning uses strategies from past experiences to dictate how to behave in the present- e.g., continuing to ride a bike after initially learning how to. [2]

Both of these learning strategies can be a result of an antecedent.

Classical conditioning was first discovered by Pavlov, who studied digestive reflexes in dogs- the results showed that different stimuli (different types of food) elicit different reflexes and responses (different compositions of saliva). [3] He then discovered that the dogs salivated before they received the food- due to the antecedent. [3] The antecedent became the bell that Pavlov rang before he fed the dogs, and the learned behavior became the salivation.

On the other hand, operant conditioning is when we respond for stimuli, not to it. [3] It is another form of social learning in which the consequence of a response makes us respond more, or more often. [3]

Variables

Antecedent stimuli (paired with reinforcing consequences) activate centers of the brain involved in motivation, [4] while antecedent stimuli that have been paired with punishing consequences activate brain centers involved in fear. [5] Antecedents play a different role while attempting to trigger positive and negative outcomes. [6]

The latter is particularly important when it comes to antecedents, as bad stimuli in the environment lead to behavioral consequences. [7]

It has been suggested that these stimuli that lead to learned behavior can be described by behavioral science principles. [7] Reinforcement theory states that the consequences of behavior drives the behavior itself- positive behaviors are rewarded and negative behaviors are either ignored or punished. [8]

Evidence

There are some scientific papers [9] [10]   that argue that there are two different types of antecedent variables. [10] These two types of antecedent variables are referred to as discriminative stimuli and setting events. [10] Setting events differ from discriminative stimuli as setting events are believed to have an effect on the stimulus-response relationship. [10] It has been suggested that setting events focus on three categories of stimuli (biological, physical and social variables). [11] Discriminative stimuli are found to be present “when a behavior is reinforced”. [10] The discriminative stimuli is believed to be the identifying event alerting the mind that a reinforcement will occur in exchange for a specific behavior. [10]

Another scientific paper [12] states that antecedent variables can be proximal (things like financial stressors or job satisfaction), and conducted an experiment to see if these stimuli could induce relapse to alcohol problems. [12] The theory here is that the learned behavior is the continuance of drinking, and this is performed to the stimuli that could be losing a job. [12] The antecedent here is a setting event, [10] as it happens due to social variables in order to effect a response. [11]

Similarly, a scientific book [13] states that culture is antecedent to behavior, but that culture can also have a direct or indirect effect on the behavior. [13] A direct effect [13] would line up with the theory of setting events as an antecedent variable, [10] as the culture is a direct social stimulus that causes an effect on the stimulus-response relationship. [10] [11] An indirect effect [13] reinforces the theory of discriminative stimuli, [10] as it is an identifying event that is one reason behind the learned behavior being performed. [10]

Stimuli that activate the "motivation" part of the brain have been tested through areas of competition in certain categories like, for example, tourism places. There are a few factors that can lead to competition changes in tourism, like hospitality, food selections, cleanliness, and more. [14] These areas of concentration (resources, facilities, etc.) are the stimuli that would be considered the second variable—setting events. This type of competitiveness affects not only where the tourists are planning on visiting, but it also affects the employees that work in tourist towns. Things like gift shops, hotels, and restaurants depend on the flow of tourism to keep their businesses thriving. This makes businesses continuously improve and change their business ways to meet consumer demands. All of these variables change the behavior of all parties involved.

Interventions

There are a number of studies [15] [16] that have been done in order to prevent past learned behaviors using antecedent variables. One intervention [15] talked about preventing bad behavior in classrooms as a positive alternative to punishment. [15] This goes against reinforcement theory, [8] which states that the consequence of the behavior drives the behavior. When it comes to behaviors in schools, the antecedent here (without intervention) could be a number of things: [15]

  1. Attention from the teacher/peers
  2. An instruction from peers/teachers that the child does not want to do
  3. Communication from staff and students when the child in question has limited/no vocal language

Each of these antecedents caused a learned behavior that is unfavourable, and this article [15] suggests some interventions to overcome the bad behavior. For example, in order to override antecedent 2, gain the students’ attention and immediately request something (e.g., a high five), before praising them and providing positive reinforcement. [15] This intervention fits in with the idea of classical conditioning, [3] as the child is rewarded with positive affirmation when they complete a task.

A different study [16] agrees that these antecedent interventions do not work on reinforcement theory, [8] and aim to reduce the probability of unwanted behavior occurring rather than punishing unwanted behavior with consequences. [16] This article similarly agrees with another [10] that setting events and discriminative stimuli are the two antecedent variables, and that both of these can be used in different ways in interventions. For example, behavior that happens due to discriminative stimuli (like a hard mathematics test leading to a student destroying it and being sent to the principal's office) is likely to reoccur again and again (as the child got out of doing the test by performing the behavior). [16] To counter this, the article, [16] suggests that the environment should be rearranged in some way so as not to provoke the individual. Changing the antecedent from a hard maths test to an easier or shorter one, or warning the child prior, had a positive effect on the behavior observed. [16]

There are still questions surrounding the role of antecedent interventions within society, as they are relatively new and not a lot is known about its applicability cross-culturally. [16] However, it is evident that there is potential for antecedents to be used in behavioral interventions, and they have been proven to positively influence behaviors like self-injury and aggression. [16]

Related Research Articles

Operant conditioning, also called instrumental conditioning, is a learning process where voluntary behaviors are modified by association with the addition of reward or aversive stimuli. The frequency or duration of the behavior may increase through reinforcement or decrease through punishment or extinction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Operant conditioning chamber</span> Laboratory apparatus used to study animal behavior

An operant conditioning chamber is a laboratory apparatus used to study animal behavior. The operant conditioning chamber was created by B. F. Skinner while he was a graduate student at Harvard University. The chamber can be used to study both operant conditioning and classical conditioning.

Classical conditioning is a behavioral procedure in which a biologically potent physiological stimulus is paired with a neutral stimulus. The term classical conditioning refers to the process of an automatic, conditioned response that is paired with a specific stimulus.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reinforcement</span> Consequence affecting an organisms future behavior

In behavioral psychology, reinforcement is any consequence that increases the likelihood of an organism's future behavior whenever that behavior is preceded by a particular antecedent stimulus. For example, a rat can be trained to push a lever to receive food whenever a light is turned on. In this example, the light is the antecedent stimulus, the lever pushing is the behavior, and the food is the reinforcement. Likewise, a student that receives attention and praise when answering a teacher's question will be more likely to answer future questions in class. The teacher's question is the antecedent, the student's response is the behavior, and the praise and attention are the reinforcements.

The experimental analysis of behavior is a science that studies the behavior of individuals across a variety of species. A key early scientist was B. F. Skinner who discovered operant behavior, reinforcers, secondary reinforcers, contingencies of reinforcement, stimulus control, shaping, intermittent schedules, discrimination, and generalization. A central method was the examination of functional relations between environment and behavior, as opposed to hypothetico-deductive learning theory that had grown up in the comparative psychology of the 1920–1950 period. Skinner's approach was characterized by observation of measurable behavior which could be predicted and controlled. It owed its early success to the effectiveness of Skinner's procedures of operant conditioning, both in the laboratory and in behavior therapy.

Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understand the behavior of humans and other animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex evoked by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual's history, including especially reinforcement and punishment contingencies, together with the individual's current motivational state and controlling stimuli. Although behaviorists generally accept the important role of heredity in determining behavior, they focus primarily on environmental events. The cognitive revolution of the late 20th century largely replaced behaviorism as an explanatory theory with cognitive psychology, which unlike behaviorism examines internal mental states.

<i>Verbal Behavior</i> Psychology book

Verbal Behavior is a 1957 book by psychologist B. F. Skinner, in which he describes what he calls verbal behavior, or what was traditionally called linguistics. Skinner's work describes the controlling elements of verbal behavior with terminology invented for the analysis - echoics, mands, tacts, autoclitics and others - as well as carefully defined uses of ordinary terms such as audience.

The law of effect is a psychology principle advanced by Edward Thorndike in 1898 on the matter of behavioral conditioning which states that "responses that produce a satisfying effect in a particular situation become more likely to occur again in that situation, and responses that produce a discomforting effect become less likely to occur again in that situation."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Animal training</span> Teaching animals specific responses to specific conditions or stimuli

Animal training is the act of teaching animals specific responses to specific conditions or stimuli. Training may be for purposes such as companionship, detection, protection, and entertainment. The type of training an animal receives will vary depending on the training method used, and the purpose for training the animal. For example, a seeing eye dog will be trained to achieve a different goal than a wild animal in a circus.

Applied behavior analysis (ABA), also called behavioral engineering, is a psychological intervention that applies approaches based upon the principles of respondent and operant conditioning to change behavior of social significance. It is the applied form of behavior analysis; the other two forms are radical behaviorism and the experimental analysis of behavior.

Behavior modification is a treatment approach that uses respondent and operant conditioning to change behavior. Based on methodological behaviorism, overt behavior is modified with (antecedent) stimulus control and consequences, including positive and negative reinforcement contingencies to increase desirable behavior, or administering positive and negative punishment and/or extinction to reduce problematic behavior. It also uses "flooding" desensitization to combat phobias.

Extinction is a behavioral phenomenon observed in both operantly conditioned and classically conditioned behavior, which manifests itself by fading of non-reinforced conditioned response over time. When operant behavior that has been previously reinforced no longer produces reinforcing consequences the behavior gradually stops occurring. In classical conditioning, when a conditioned stimulus is presented alone, so that it no longer predicts the coming of the unconditioned stimulus, conditioned responding gradually stops. For example, after Pavlov's dog was conditioned to salivate at the sound of a metronome, it eventually stopped salivating to the metronome after the metronome had been sounded repeatedly but no food came. Many anxiety disorders such as post traumatic stress disorder are believed to reflect, at least in part, a failure to extinguish conditioned fear.

In operant conditioning, punishment is any change in a human or animal's surroundings which, occurring after a given behavior or response, reduces the likelihood of that behavior occurring again in the future. As with reinforcement, it is the behavior, not the human/animal, that is punished. Whether a change is or is not punishing is determined by its effect on the rate that the behavior occurs. This is called motivating operations (MO), because they alter the effectiveness of a stimulus. MO can be categorized in abolishing operations, decrease the effectiveness of the stimuli and establishing, increase the effectiveness of the stimuli. For example, a painful stimulus which would act as a punisher for most people may actually reinforce some behaviors of masochistic individuals.

Behavioral momentum is a theory in quantitative analysis of behavior and is a behavioral metaphor based on physical momentum. It describes the general relation between resistance to change and the rate of reinforcement obtained in a given situation.

In behavioral psychology, stimulus control is a phenomenon in operant conditioning that occurs when an organism behaves in one way in the presence of a given stimulus and another way in its absence. A stimulus that modifies behavior in this manner is either a discriminative stimulus or stimulus delta. For example, the presence of a stop sign at a traffic intersection alerts the driver to stop driving and increases the probability that braking behavior occurs. Stimulus control does not force behavior to occur, as it is a direct result of historical reinforcement contingencies, as opposed to reflexive behavior elicited through classical conditioning.

Motivating operation (MO) is a behavioristic concept introduced by Jack Michael in 1982. It is used to explain variations in the effects in the consequences of behavior. Most importantly, an MO affects how strongly the individual is reinforced or punished by the consequences of their behavior. For example, food deprivation is a motivating operation; if a idividual is hungry, food is strongly reinforcing, but if they are satiated, food is less reinforcing. In 2003 Laraway suggested subdividing MOs into those that increase the reinforcing or punishing effects of a stimulus, which are termed establishing operations, and MOs that decrease the reinforcing or punishing effects of a stimulus, which are termed abolishing operations.

Functional behavior assessment (FBA) is an ongoing process of collecting information with a goal of identifying the environmental variables that control a problem or target behavior. The purpose of the assessment is to prove and aid the effectiveness of the interventions or treatments used to help eliminate the problem behavior. Through functional behavior assessments, we have learned that there are complex patterns to people's seemingly unproductive behaviors. It is important to not only pay attention to consequences that follow the behavior but also the antecedent that evokes the behavior. More work needs to be done in the future with functional assessment including balancing precision and efficiency, being more specific with variables involved and a more smooth transition from assessment to intervention.

The differential outcomes effect (DOE) is a theory in behaviorism, a branch of psychology, that shows that a positive effect on accuracy occurs in discrimination learning between different stimuli when unique rewards are paired with each individual stimulus. The DOE was first demonstrated in 1970 by Milton Trapold on an experiment with rats. Rats were trained to discriminate between a clicker and a tone by pressing the left and right levers. Half of the rats were trained using the differential outcomes procedure (DOP), where the clicker was paired with sucrose and tone with food pellets. The remaining rats were trained with only sucrose or only food pellets. The rats trained with the DOP were significantly more accurate than those trained with only one type of reinforcement. Since then it has been established through a myriad of experiments that the DOE exists in most species capable of learning.


Human contingency learning (HCL) is the observation that people tend to acquire knowledge based on whichever outcome has the highest probability of occurring from particular stimuli. In other words, individuals gather associations between a certain behaviour and a specific consequence. It is a form of learning for many organisms.

Association in psychology refers to a mental connection between concepts, events, or mental states that usually stems from specific experiences. Associations are seen throughout several schools of thought in psychology including behaviorism, associationism, psychoanalysis, social psychology, and structuralism. The idea stems from Plato and Aristotle, especially with regard to the succession of memories, and it was carried on by philosophers such as John Locke, David Hume, David Hartley, and James Mill. It finds its place in modern psychology in such areas as memory, learning, and the study of neural pathways.

References

  1. ↑ "Definition of Antecedent". Merriam Webster.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Li P (2022-06-19). "6 Types of Learned Behavior and Why Some Are So Hard to Change". Parenting For Brain. Retrieved 2023-03-24.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Gray P, Bjorklund D (2018). Psychology (8th ed.). Macmillan Learning.
  4. ↑ Yin HH, Ostlund SB, Balleine BW (October 2008). "Reward-guided learning beyond dopamine in the nucleus accumbens: the integrative functions of cortico-basal ganglia networks". The European Journal of Neuroscience. 28 (8): 1437–1448. doi:10.1111/j.1460-9568.2008.06422.x. PMC   2756656 . PMID   18793321.
  5. ↑ Killcross S, Robbins TW, Everitt BJ (July 1997). "Different types of fear-conditioned behaviour mediated by separate nuclei within amygdala". Nature. 388 (6640): 377–380. doi: 10.1038/41097 . PMID   9237754. S2CID   205028225.
  6. ↑ "Understanding the Antecedent Behaviour Consequence Model". Better Help. 2023. Retrieved 2023-03-24.
  7. 1 2 Smith RG, Iwata BA (June 1997). "Antecedent influences on behavior disorders". Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. 30 (2): 343–375. doi:10.1901/jaba.1997.30-343. PMC   1284051 . PMID   9210312.
  8. 1 2 3 Gordon J (April 2022). "Reinforcement Theory of Motivation - Explained". The Business Professor, LLC. Retrieved 2023-03-24.
  9. ↑ McAtee M, Carr EG, Schulte C, Dunlap G (July 2004). "A Contextual Assessment Inventory for Problem Behavior: Initial Development". Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions. 6 (3): 148–165. doi:10.1177/10983007040060030301. ISSN   1098-3007. S2CID   145609185.
  10. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Simó-Pinatella D, Font-Roura J, Alomar-Kurz E, Giné C, Matson JL, Cifre I (December 2013). "Antecedent events as predictive variables for behavioral function". Research in Developmental Disabilities. 34 (12): 4582–4590. doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2013.09.040. PMID   24210354.
  11. 1 2 3 Offord DR, Cross LA (September 1969). "Behavioral antecedents of adult schizophrenia. A review". Archives of General Psychiatry. 21 (3): 267–283. doi:10.1001/archpsyc.1969.01740210011003. PMID   4896630.
  12. 1 2 3 Miller WR, Westerberg VS, Harris RJ, Tonigan JS (December 1996). "What predicts relapse? Prospective testing of antecedent models". Addiction. 91 Suppl (12s1): S155–S172. doi:10.1046/j.1360-0443.91.12s1.7.x. PMID   8997790.
  13. 1 2 3 4 Berry JW, Poortinga YH, Pandey J (1997). Handbook of cross-cultural psychology. Allyn and Bacon. ISBN   0-205-16074-3. OCLC   34545082.
  14. ↑ Cheng Z, Jin M, Jiang Q (2021-04-09). "Research into the Competitiveness of Scenic Areas from the Perspective of Tourists: A Case Study of the Jiuzhai Valley". Emerging Markets Finance and Trade. 57 (5): 1349–1357. doi:10.1080/1540496X.2019.1672530. ISSN   1540-496X. S2CID   211327931.
  15. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Wood CL, Kisinger KW, Brosh CR, Fisher LB, Muharib R (2018-05-31). "Stopping Behavior Before It Starts: Antecedent Interventions for Challenging Behavior". Teaching Exceptional Children. 50 (6): 356–363. doi:10.1177/0040059918775052. ISSN   0040-0599. S2CID   149649499.
  16. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Kern L, Choutka CM, Sokol NG (2002). "Assessment-Based Antecedent Interventions Used in Natural Settings to Reduce Challenging Behavior: An Analysis of the Literature" (PDF). Education and Treatment of Children. 25 (1): 113–130. JSTOR   42900519 – via JSTOR.
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