This seems largely correct to me, although I think hyperbolic discounting of rewards/punishments over time may be less pronounced in human conditioning as compared to animals being conditioned by humans. Humans can think “I’m now rewarding myself for Action A I took earlier” or “I’m being punished for Action B” which can seems, at least in my experience, to decrease the effect of the temporal distance whereas animals seem less able to conceptualize the connection over time. Because of this difference, I think the temporal difference of reward/punishment is less important in people for conditioning as long as the individual is mentally associating the stimulus with the action, although it is still significant.
Also what’s the name of the paper for the monkeys and juice study? I’d like to look at it because the result did surprise me.
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense to me that explicit cognition can interfere with the underlying, more “automatic” conditioning. Narrative framing and preforming intentions and focusing attention on the link between X and Y seem to have a strong influence on how conditioning does or doesn’t work, and I don’t know what the mechanisms are.
That being said, I think we agree that, in situations where there’s not a lot of conscious attention on what’s happening, the conditioning proceeds something like “normally,” where “normal” is “comparable to what happens in less sapient animals”?
This seems largely correct to me, although I think hyperbolic discounting of rewards/punishments over time may be less pronounced in human conditioning as compared to animals being conditioned by humans. Humans can think “I’m now rewarding myself for Action A I took earlier” or “I’m being punished for Action B” which can seems, at least in my experience, to decrease the effect of the temporal distance whereas animals seem less able to conceptualize the connection over time. Because of this difference, I think the temporal difference of reward/punishment is less important in people for conditioning as long as the individual is mentally associating the stimulus with the action, although it is still significant.
Also what’s the name of the paper for the monkeys and juice study? I’d like to look at it because the result did surprise me.
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense to me that explicit cognition can interfere with the underlying, more “automatic” conditioning. Narrative framing and preforming intentions and focusing attention on the link between X and Y seem to have a strong influence on how conditioning does or doesn’t work, and I don’t know what the mechanisms are.
That being said, I think we agree that, in situations where there’s not a lot of conscious attention on what’s happening, the conditioning proceeds something like “normally,” where “normal” is “comparable to what happens in less sapient animals”?
I couldn’t dig up the original study from my phone but I found this, which references it: https://www.cogneurosociety.org/series1predictionreward/