Shift in Activity and the Concept of Persisting Tendency

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on shift in activity and the concept of persisting tendency. Analysis of shift in activity is an important part of the development of behavior theory. Knowledge of the processes that take place in the interval between the onset of a stimulus and the occurrence of an activity is fundamental to an understanding of shift in activity. Shift in activity can be analyzed by the discrete random process and the continuous deterministic process models. At a molar level, there seem to be sharp differences between stimulus-bound theories in which stimuli are viewed as the “causes” of responses and tendency theory in which stimuli effect changes in the strength of tendencies, but tendencies are responsible for the existence of activities. The immediate cause of an event must be active at the time the event begins to occur. But at the time a habit action is evoked, the reinforcing event may be long past, that is, it may no longer exist; and something which does not exist can scarcely be the cause of anything. Thus, the immediate cause of habit-mediated action evocation must be a combination of: (1) the stimulus event; and (2) a relatively permanent condition or organization left by the reinforcement within the nervous system of the animal.