ACQUISITION OF A PROBABILISTIC DISCRIMINATION BETWEEN SUBSEQUENT ALTERNATIVE EVENTS

摘要

Acquisition of stable predictive decisions and consistent discrimination between pairs of alternative stimuli is shown to be dependent upon both the frequency on occurrence on each member on a pair and the degree of similarity between such members. The rate of acquisition is determined by the degree of similarity with highly similar alternatives requiring the greater length of time before stable predictive decisions occur. The terminal asymptotic rate of such predictive decisions is determined by the actual frequency of occurrence of alternative members of the discriminated set.