John A. Nevin - Böcker

This volume is based on the 10th annual Harvard Symposium for the Quantitative Analysis of Behavior. The first Harvard Symposium was devoted to signal-detection analyses of reinforcement and choice behavior. The present volume reprises the original signal- detection theme, incorporating additional insights based on experimental and theoretical analyses undertaken during the years separating the two conferences. This collection illustrates how signal-detection theory, first advanced to account for performance in threshold-level sensory discrimination, has broadened to encompass a variety of psychological problems involving discriminations between confusable stimuli. The approach is quantitative in its emphasis on estimation of independent parameters of the discrimination process, and analytical in its efforts to separate the determiners of discriminability and bias and to identify the mechanisms of their operation. Above all, the book is broadly integrative in its approach to diverse problems. This volume is based on the 10th annual Harvard Symposium for the Quantitative Analysis of Behavior. The first Harvard Symposium was devoted to signal-detection analyses of reinforcement and choice behavior. The present volume reprises the original signal- detection theme, incorporating additional insights based on experimental and theoretical analyses undertaken during the years separating the two conferences.

First published in 1986. This is Volume V of six in a series on Quantitative Analyses of Behavior. Quantitative analysis now generally refers to the fact that theoretical issues are represented by quantitative models. An analysis is not a matter of fitting arbitrary functions to data points. The volumes in the present series have been written for behavioral scientists. Those concerned with issues in the study of how behavior is acquired and then allocated in various environments-biologists, psychologists, economists, anthropologists, and other researchers, as well as graduate students and advanced undergraduates in those areas-should find volumes in this series to be state-of the-art readers and reference works. Each volume of the series examines a particular topic that has been discussed at the annual Symposium on Quantitative Analyses of Behavior held at Harvard University. This volume, V, addresses the topic of how reinforcement value is affected by delay and intervening events. Self-control studies are also presented and discussed.