Hull Spence Theory

  An interesting theory described in the slides is the Hull Spence’s drive reduction theory, which is an interesting explatation on how the ratio of a rewarding and or difficult task to its completion is correlated to a person's arousal levels. An example of this could be feeling the pressure of a high stakes test, and not feeling secure about a correct response but having a stronger response to an incorrect answer. I believe this theory can be easily applied to many people’s first high stakes test, which is their drivers test. In New Jersey, the requirement to pass is an 80%, and the stress arousal for a student taking one could arguably be quite elevated. In this example and for Hull’s definition, the performance of the behavior being learned, in this case, being able to drive, isn’t attributed to habituation, which would be a decrease in the response skill, but rather for a motivational use. In this case, the motivation is for the freedom of being able to drive a car, and the complex task of driving has more of a focus on incorrections rather than passes. Unfortunately, although a majority of studies used for this theory are unfortunately quite old, (the youngest study I could find was from the 90s), but an experiment run in the 70s on two rats, who had two responses to give to a task, and afterwards the experiment had confirmed that, “Two major assumptions of Spence's discrimination learning theory were confirmed: (a) learning is continuous, and (b) discriminative stimuli in simple discrimination tasks of both simultaneous and successive types are compounds with position elements as well as elements from the relevant visual dimension. The distinctive, consistent pattern of learning revealed by the choice-time measure suggests that position habits reflect a learning strategy in which the complex task is learned as a series of simpler ones.” (Robert D Hall,

Choice times and Spence's discrimination learning theory, Learning and Motivation, Volume 6, Issue 2, 1975, Pages 202-216). Although this theory is, quite frankly outdated and obsolete, 

it is an interesting older explanation so to speak to explain how difficult tasks seem to make someone more focused on their mistakes rather than triumphs.

Reference: Robert D Hall, Choice times and Spence's discrimination learning theory, Learning and Motivation, Volume 6, Issue 2, 1975, Pages 202-216, ISSN 0023-9690, https://doi.org/10.1016/0023-9690(75)90022-3.

(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0023969075900223)