Somewhat Off-Topic Psychology lesson (WAS: Re: Help I'm new)

[Barry Callahan]

>On Wed, 23 Jan 2002, Joel Hammer wrote:
>
>> Isn't it great when things work? Intermittent reinforcement. I think
>> that is how they train pigeons and white mice.
> Joel
>
> On Wed, Jan 23, 2002 at 05:04:51PM -0800, Cheryl Pelletier wrote:
> > Thanks again Joel Changing the guest account to root really opened up the
> > server. But it's no problem sence it's only for home... thanks
> > again...........Daryl

You know, it's well known that you can train a rat to press a lever by giving it 
a food pellet every time it does it.  Eventually, if you stop rewarding the rat 
with the food, it'll still sit there banging on the lever all day.

Now, after a long enough period of not being rewarded for pressing the lever, 
the rat will give up and return to a more "normal" behaviour for a rat, but 
it'll still press the lever every so often just in case (more so than a rat that 
hadn't been trained).

With training by intermittent reinforcement, you get the rat to keep pressing 
the lever unrewarded for a much longer period of time because it's always 
expecting that the next press will pay off.  Very much similar to the people who 
end up declaring bankruptcy because they couldn't resist sitting down in front 
of a slot machine.

What's more interesting is that during training, if you give the rat an electric 
shock via the floor of the cage in addition to giving it food, when you stop 
rewarding it, the rat will still sit there pressing the lever getting shocked.  
Depending on how obsessed the training program has made the rat and the 
intensity of the shock, it's entirely possible to end up with a very fried rat.

I'm thinking Daryl's setting himself up to be Samba-user flambee'.