 of a teacher's success. It's got some pretty cool posters. I don't want to mix them up. Although they don't stick to your walls very damn well, which is why we have to put them up every week. But this week, not gonna happen because we've habituated to them being on the wall. Which is relevant, given the article for today. My tiny, no pet. All right, so here we go. Are you ready? I'm ready. Are you ready? Are you ready? He didn't know. I'm doing my thing. Thank you. You do your thing all the way. All right, we all do our things. All right. Dynamic changes in reinforcer effectiveness. Wow, satiation and habituation have different applications for theory and practice. Dr. Francis K. McSweeney, Washington State University. Skinner's Law Institute. Amazing advisor. So, awesome lady. Got the lucky opportunity to spend a little bit of time in her lab and have her as a professor. And she was on my master's committee, thesis committee, and my dissertation committee. And wow, she's cool. So, I didn't pick this article. And Brad didn't pick this article simply because it was from Dr. McSweeney. We picked it because it's hyper relevant to everything that we do as behavior analysts. And for reasons that there's an article written about, which we might get into later, class ceiling, it hasn't been adopted widespread. However, this article probably should be. So, the point of this article is that we tend to see that there's some language issues in our field. And Skinner talked about these language issues, how we need to operationally define everything, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and the value of that, and so on and so forth. But there's Skinner himself identified a problem with reinforcers, how they don't have a consistent effect on behavior. Others have identified it as well. It's not just Skinner. I mean, Skinner talked about it. Others have talked about it as well, doesn't matter how many people we want to cover here, but just know that up until the McSweeney series of articles, it was often referred to as how you satiate to a reinforcer. But that's complete hogwash. There may be some reinforcers to which you do satiate under certain times. Maybe if I'm full of drinking liquid, it's crystallized amazing. If I'm full of drinking liquid, it's entirely possible that I could satiate to that liquid. But what about money? Do you satiate to money? Interesting question. So Fran, I don't even want to go there. Like, brain's not ready for that sort of thing. Generalized condition reinforcers. All right. So, no, all right. So, Fran opens, and I will refer to Francis, Game McSweeney as Fran because I know her personally. So, Dr. McSweeney Fran, she talks about how the terms have power in their own right. So, whether or not you talk about the changes in reinforcer effectiveness over a particular session as being due to satiation or being due to a situation, it's actually an important distinction to choose the word properly. Why? Well, why? Because our science does not stand alone, independent of other sciences. There are other fields that study satiation. There are other fields that study habituation. Habituation is an extremely well-run process. Maybe if we stick to terms and define them well, we can achieve more quickly that conciliant stuff that we've talked about in some other behaviors, the merging of sciences. And if our definitions match other definitions in other branches of science, then it's easier to understand what we're talking about and we keep this consistent language across the board. And one of the things that I think Fran talks about, and not I think, I know she talks about it, is that we didn't do that in our field. We chose the term satiation to mean anytime that reinforces or loses effectiveness. There's so much to like go into here. You're thinking motivation operate, motivating operations, you're thinking all that stuff is good. That's what you should be thinking. And the point being that it's probably not satiation, it's probably actually habituation. So this is a long article, and there's a whole bunch of articles that are presented on this topic. And I find it interesting that it had to be presented this way. But Fran literally has four pages of references in this article. And it starts out that this is not an experiment. This is a summary of what has gone on in habituation literature and understanding how we change in response to stimuli or is how we how we how we change our responses to reinforcers and how much behavior they quote unquote hold so to speak. So all right, without going into every gross detail, there is a couple of very clear patterns that happen with reinforcers. When you do when you break these down into the rate of operant responding or unit of time, right? So time units over a session. So session is typically under an hour, right about an hour, 50 minutes to an hour, somewhere in there depending on which study you're looking at. So the rate of reinforcement that you provide produces different patterns of responding within that that timeframe. So if you have a sort of rate that's kind of middle of the red, what was it three respondents. So sorry, if you if you respond, if you produce reinforcers at a low rate, then if then the rate of responding increases, if you produce them at a high rate, the rate of responding decreases, if you find a middle of the middle middle ground, so to speak, in there, the behavior goes up. And so the proportion of responding goes up, and then it drops down. Basically, it follows classic extinction curves or habituation curves. So in other words, the effectiveness of a reinforcer changes depending on how frequently you provide it within a particular session. It's really that simple. And I've already said you're jumping into MOs and you should and you should think about that stuff. Okay, so overwhelming evidence across multiple species basically argues that the changes in response patterns with regard to the reinforcer presentation within a session is due to habituation and sensitization, and not satiation. This article goes into the 13 different categories of characteristics of habituation. I'm not going to go through them all, but they're all right there. So there's 13 different characteristics. Fran's Lamb has done verified one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11 of those, 11 of those in a particular context of, in the particular context of reinforcers being delivered within a particular session, right? Across multiple species from rats to pee rats to, I think there was, there's other species in there, including humans, right? So, and that was kind of cool, the human stuff. Let's see what other notes do I have. There's just so much to talk about here. So ultimately, it's really simple. The longer you go within a session, as long as you're using the same reinforcer, that reinforcer is less effective over time. In other words, it doesn't hold as much behavior, right? So by the time you get towards the end of the session, right, that reinforcer is losing its effectiveness. What implication does that have for extinction? What implication does that have for multiple schedules of reinforcement? Think about how we respond to reinforcers. And one of the, one of the things that they talked about in here was that we describe an organism as being associated on that reinforcer, but it's not. That's what it has to do with the food consumption thing, right? How about smelling foods? Because that was one of these criteria, right? So humans smelling hamburgers and tasting hamburgers and getting access to hamburgers and switching it up and switching it to, I think it was apple pie, if I recall correctly, or something to that effect. And the behavior basically jumping right back. This article is brilliant in the fact that it summarizes all of the research that argues on behalf that habituation is an actual thing that you can bitch with reinforcers. So, non-contingent reinforcer delivery. Oh, side note, whoop, a little beep here. I love the fact that Fran talked about non-contingent reinforcer delivery, because non-contingent reinforcement is a bunch of PS, but you can deliver reinforcers non-contingently, because reinforcement by definition requires the convention of peace, right? So Fran chooses her language very carefully. It just looks kind of good. And I think it's important to note some of those things when you're out there that sometimes we use language that's a little bit more loosey-goosey than what it implies, than what the literature implies. Wheel running, we've seen this stuff in wheel running, exercise, right? Habituation to wheel running, about drug consumption. There's so much in here, like I could spend the next two days talking about it, and I probably will. So anyway, beside the point, take a look at the article, read through it, understand that you do habituate to reinforcers, at least that's Fran's argument, and she has a lot of solid evidence to back it up. And the reinforcers basically lose their effectiveness within a particular session. So, and it does look like somebody in the room has something to say, so I'm going to relinquish my seat and pass it up. Oh, oh my gosh, I don't know what's going on. So you're telling me someone engaged in a task for a long period of time, earning a particular reward, say, working the shop, right? We've made how many videos throughout the cycle? Well, almost 800 now. 800 videos. So you're telling me we've done that many videos, that many books, that many hours, and that nail gun is still reinforcing? You notice he was presented with the nail gun and didn't continue lecturing and just put it down. So I would say, no, and you can't eat a nail gun, at least you shouldn't eat a nail gun, because I'd be worried about all the implications of that. That would be pika. That would be pika, which we don't, I hope they habituate quickly. Yeah, that would be good. Yeah, that would be good. But my point is, habituations of thing. You get kids engaged in activities, adults engaged in activities where it becomes no longer meaningful. And when you run into that, mix up your reinforcers, and you'll notice your non-compliant bits and your ability to run longer sessions and more trials of whatever skill you're working on. You can even do stuff like this, folks. There's one of the studies talks about this. Do you have something along these lines? Well, hold on, let me do some more. So it's salient? Yeah. All right. I'm sure you can see it in the video. But your idea is, change it up. A disabituation stimulus, right? And then all of a sudden the behavior comes right back. When you switch everything off and switch it back on, behavior comes right back. This is one of the studies that they've done, a series of studies that they've done. It's overwhelmingly cool to see what happens when you actually start to understand that you habituate to reinforcers and you program around that. Like, hello. Use your evidence. And one last point that I'd like to make that I don't know what Greg wants to make as well, but this is EAB. And it does connect immediately to the applied world. Just because this study was done on a handful of species, or these studies were done on a handful of species, and it was done in the highly controlled laboratory, doesn't mean it's not valuable. In fact, if you read this, they talk about all of that stuff and the value of applying this in the real world. EAB connects, folks. It does. Really. No way. Yes. Rats are a thing. What? People aren't rats. Experimental analysis of behavior, folks. There's a reason that we like to look at it and study it and listen to it because it does have value for the applied world. That's the habituation for you. There you go. Habituation of reinforcers. One of the oldest known learning processes across so many species. One of the most basic learning processes. But natural levels so you keep talking about it. I'll keep talking forever and look out. This is a hot topic. And I love the fact that there's, listen to all these articles, McSweeney, McSweeney, McSweeney, McSweeney, McSweeney, McSweeney, McSweeney, McSweeney, McSweeney, McSweeney, McSweeney, McSweeney, McSweeney. And these are only first of all the ships, McSweeney, McSweeney, McSweeney, McSweeney, McSweeney, McSweeney, McSweeney, McSweeney.