The term ‘reinforcement’

The term ‘reinforcement’ can be used in a purely behaviorist sense   instead: to mean either strengthening a stimulus – response habit    Hull’s   sense of reinforcement or to increase the rate (probability) of   response emission    Skinner’s sense of reinforcement. Used in   those ways, it is purely descriptive    describing an environment-behavior   relation.. It applies only to responses that have actually been reinforced,   and is equivalent to the measured strength or rate of a behavioral   response. White has suggested a distinction between ‘reinforcement’      strengthening of stimulus–response tendencies, equivalent to the meaning   of non-Skinnerian behaviorists. and ‘reward’    confer-   ring ability to elicit approach, more similar to incentive motivation..   However, these meanings are often combined, and the term ‘reinforcement’   is typically used by behavioral neuroscientists in ways that   differ from the original behaviorist meaning of increased habit strength      quite reasonably, since the behaviorist meaning is inadequate to account   for many effects For example, place preference measures   are sometimes used to assess ‘reinforcement’ even when no response has   been ‘reinforced’    as when the animal is trained by putting it passively in   the ‘reinforced place’.. Or, as another example, some have inferred a   decrease in reinforcement from an increase in drug self-administration   responses after neuroleptic treatment    e.g.,., a direct contradiction   of the behaviorist definition that reinforcement is proportional to   the change in response strength. Or, as a final example, ‘reinforcement’   has been used to refer to a neural event elicited by a food or drug   stimulus, independent of whether any behavioral response is strengthened      e.g., Reinforcement always carries additional non-behaviorist   connotations whenever it is used in these and many other ways   to refer to a psychological or neural property other than response strength.   When used in such ways, ‘reinforcement’ becomes at least implicitly a   synonym for a hidden psychological process—typically equivalent to   hedonic impact—and often is used as a way of invoking this psychological   process without naming it and without giving any other clear definition of what is meant. As Kiyatkin    . puts it, ‘‘Although it   has not been clearly stated, implicit in much of the current literature is the   hypothesis that phasic activation of VTA DA cells with subsequent   increase in DA release, particularly in NAcc, is the principal neurochemical   event associated with natural and drug reinforcement.’’ Dopamine   hypotheses of ‘reinforcement’ that are not restricted to behaviorist S–R   habit strengthening will be treated here as implicit equivalents of the   hedonia hypothesis   see Wise for more discussion of meanings of   ‘reinforcement’, and Berridge for discussion of meanings of ‘hedonic   impact’  

References

Berridge, Kent C., and Terry E. Robinson. 1998. “What is the role of dopamine in reward: Hedonic impact, reward