Quadrants Tied Together

Some people had some trouble with my example of negative reinforcement, not sure why it was considered R-, not Positive Punishment? "As you walk together, your friend prods you with a stick, ouch, you move away. Then every couple steps your friend prods you again. First left, then right, you don't know where to go to escape the potential jab or slap from the stick. You slow down and take every step carefully, watching for the stick to raise up to let you know you chose wrong. "

It's a good question! Negative Reinforcement and Positive Punishment are inherently tied together. R- is the removal of an aversive. But that means that an aversive first had to be added (which is usually P+). We can't remove something that isn't there. We can't remove something that we don't control. So we need to ADD and aversive, so that when the horse does what we want we can remove it. So yes, it does look like P+ because you added an aversive so you could remove it at the right time.

The way we know if it was P+ or R- or both is to see what happened to the behavior. If the behavior got stronger, then it was reinforced. If the behavior reduced it was punished. In this example the learner learned to move away from the aversive, even from the threat of the aversive (the movement of the friend's hand/stick). So moving away was reinforced. However movement also reduced, the learner slowed down and became hesitant to move anywhere, thus the behavior of moving has been punished. So in this scenario, both R- and P+ happen.

When we apply an aversive to a scenario, we are potentially punishing what the horse is currently doing, until they do what we want to earn removal of the aversive/punisher. Because WE ADDED the aversive.

So are R+ and P- tied together? To a degree, but not the same way because we are adding not subtracting. If we add an appetitive, we don't take it away. We add a finite amount of appetitive stimulus (food) the horse consumes it, it's not removed from the horse. We don't take away/remove the appetitive. Because the addition is the valuable thing, there is no removal.

However, they can be tied if the horse feels that the food is theirs and you are withholding the food, preventing them from getting it. This is individual, some horses feel this immediately as the human/food enters the environment. Some horses only feel this if they're offering behaviors they think will work but are not being reinforced. Others may not ever feel this way. Usually when we see this becoming part of the situation it's because the horse has a major lifestyle issue with limited access to resources and resource related anxiety - or we are making mistakes in our training with inconsistent timing, too low of a rate of reinforcement, or unclear criteria.