Awareness and the operant conditioning of a cooperative response.

Investigators with an operant conditioning orientation have produced evidence that conditioning can occur without awareness, whereas workers from a cognitive learning theory point of view, employing somewhat different experimetnal procedures, have obtained results supporting the hypothesis that conditioning only occurs in subjects who become aware of the response-reinforcement contingency. Moreover, cognitive theorists maintain that increments in conditioning perform­ ance occur only after awareness. The theory of Postman and Sassenrath, on the other hand, holds that some conditioning occurs prior to aware­ ness and that awareness is both a result of past improvement and a condition of further improvement in conditioning performance. Im­ portant in generalizing about the role of awareness in conditioning is the fact that the present study was uniquely different from other studies of awareness in several ways. The reinforced response class was a physical one rather than a verbal one and involved the behavior of two individuals instead of one, candy instead of a verbal stimulus was used as the reinforcer, the experimental nature of the study was not apparent to the subjects, who were children rather than adults, and most importantly, the experimental design was unique among studies of awareness in providing a sensitive measure of the temporal relation­ ship of awareness to conditioning rate. The cooperative response was defined according to a four-dimensional scheme involving the sequential vs. non-sequential, latency, duration, and topography dimensions of the