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| Reinforcement Contingencies and the Stimulus Control of Behavior: From Food to Drug Self-Administration as Reinforcers |
| Tuesday, May 29, 2007 |
| 10:00 AM–10:50 AM |
| Douglas B |
| Area: EAB; Domain: Basic Research |
| Chair: William D. Timberlake (Indiana University) |
| STANLEY J. WEISS (American University) |
 Dr. Stanley J. Weiss, Professor of Experimental Psychology at American University, and a former chair of the department, received his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University and his B.A. from the City College of New York. His research has been funded for over 25 years by grants and fellowships awarded by National Institute of Mental Health, National Science Foundation and National Institute on Drug Abuse. In 2003, Dr. Weiss was a Fulbright Scholar/Researcher at Pavlov Medical University in St. Petersburg, Russia. He was elected a Fellow of APA Divisions 3 (Experimental Psychology) and 25 (Experimental Analysis of Behavior). He has been a visiting professor at Cambridge University, Hebrew University, St. Andrews University, the University of New South Wales, and the University of Colorado. Dr. Weiss was elected President of the Eastern Psychological Association (EPA) for the 2005-2006 term and has served for many years on the EPA Board of Directors as well as the EPA Program Committee. He has been the Convener of the Winter Conference on Animal Learning & Behavior since 2002. Dr. Weiss’ research is concerned with the role of operant and classical contingencies in stimulus control and incentive motivation, the role of learning mechanisms in drug abuse, and biological constraints on learning. |
| Abstract: In his invited address, Dr. Weiss shows how the principles of stimulus control established through his research with traditional appetitive reinforcers can be applied to further our understanding of drug abuse, craving, and the loss of control that is a hallmark of addiction. He describes an instrumentally derived incentive-motive function. This function is based on the stimulus-reinforcer associations implicitly created in operant discriminative situations through the embedded reinforcement differences between schedule components. Those reinforcement contingencies that maximally energize behavior according to this function are then employed with drug self-administration (cocaine or heroin) rather than food as the reinforcer. This revealed how environmental cues related to the drug-taking experience come to energize drug-related behavior, plus how exposing rats to combinations of these cues can triple their drug seeking and even override reinforcement-related mechanisms that normally regulate drug-intake. Symmetrically, Weiss also describes how stimulus control processes can be used to decrease drug seeking. A systematic investigation of conditioned inhibition within the context of drug self-administration is presented that provides findings relevant to behavioral treatments of drug abuse. |
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