Behavior Analysis Fundamentals Practice Test

The main idea here is how past learning from reinforcement shapes current behavior. The reinforcement history refers to all reinforcement contingencies an organism has experienced over its lifetime—the patterns of what actions were followed by rewards, the types of reinforcement used, and the schedules and contexts in which they occurred. This history influences which behaviors are more likely to occur now, because the organism has learned from those past contingencies which actions tend to be reinforced. The discriminative stimulus is a cue that signals when a particular reinforcement is available, not the entire set of past reinforcement experiences. The independent variable is a research term for what the experimenter changes to study effects, not the organism’s lifetime learning. The environment is the surrounding conditions, which can include many factors, but the term reinforcement history focuses specifically on the learned influence of past reinforcement, making it the best fit.