We manipulated relative reinforcement for problem behavior and appropriate behavior using differential reinforcement of alternative behavior (DRA) without an extinction component. Seven children with developmental disabilities participated. We manipulated duration (Experiment 1), quality (Experiment 2), delay (Experiment 3), or a combination of each (Experiment 4), such that reinforcement favor...

In this study, we examined decision-making to rewarding or punishing stimuli in individuals with psychopathy (n = 21) and comparison individuals (n = 19) using the Differential Reward/Punishment Learning Task. In this task, the participant chooses between two objects associated with different levels of reward or punishment. Thus, response choice indexes not only reward/punishment sensitivity bu...

This article addresses weighting and partitioning, in complex reinforcement learning tasks, with the aim of facilitating learning. The article presents some ideas regarding weighting of multiple agents and extends them into partitioning an input/state space into multiple regions with differential weighting in these regions, to exploit differential characteristics of regions and differential cha...

This article addresses weighting and partitioning, in complex reinforcement learning tasks, with the aim of facilitating learning. The article presents some ideas regarding weighting of multiple agents and extends them into partitioning an input/state space into multiple regions with differential weighting in these regions, to exploit differential characteristics of regions and differential cha...

There is a story about Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, which, although charming, has not been verified as historical fact (Strachey, 1921). Whether true or not, the story illustrates the use of differential reinforcement. As the story goes, shortly after their marriage, Prince Albert and Queen Victoria had a quarrel. Albert walked (or stomped, depending on the telling) out of the room and loc...

A set of four manipulanda were presented to four Cebus monkeys, individually, and later in pairs. Step 1 provided an estimate of each S's probability of operating each item, while Step 2 determined whether pairing the items would disturb the ordinal relations among individual response probabilities. Both procedures provided information necessary for testing the assumption that a reinforcer is s...

This paper describes our strategy to approach reinforcement learning in robotic domains including the use of neural networks. We summarize our recent work on model-based reinforcement learning where models of hierarchical dynamic system are learned with stochastic neural networks [Yamaguchi and Atkeson, 2016b], and actions are planned with stochastic differential dynamic programming [Yamaguchi ...

The present study investigated the effects of differential negative reinforcement of other behavior (DNRO) on problem behavior evoked by music in a 7-year-old child with pervasive developmental disorder. Following an auditory stimulus assessment, DNRO was used to reduce problem behavior to near-zero levels. Results are discussed in terms of identifying establishing operations to govern treatmen...

Repetitive and invariant behavior is a diagnostic feature of autism. We implemented a lag reinforcement schedule to increase response diversity for 6 participants with autism aged 6 to 10 years, 4 of whom also received prompting plus additional training. These procedures appeared to increase the variety of building-block structures, demonstrating that an intervention that includes differential ...