The Effect of Cue Change and Drive on a Running Response

In studying the learned behavior of organisms, experimenters usually focus on some particular response and its relationship to systematically varied external stimuli and/or deprivations operations. Any given response can be considered to vary in three ways: It can be strengthened, it can be weakened, or it can be maintained at a more or less constant level. The strength (or weakness) of a response can be indexed in several ways. One can, for instance, measure the latency of the response, the amplitude of the response, the number of response elicitations to produce experimental extinction, the probability of response occurrence, the frequency of responding, or the percentage of "correct" responding.