In operant conditioning, rats pressing levers and pigeons pecking keys depend on contingent food reinforcement. Food reward agrees with Skinner's behaviorism, undergraduate textbooks, and folk psychology. However, nearly a century of experimental evidence shows, instead, that food in an operant conditioning chamber acts forward to evoke species-specific feeding behavior rather than backward to reinforce experimenter-defined responses. Furthermore, recent findings in neuroscience show consistently that intracranial stimulation to reward centers and dopamine release, the proposed reward molecule, also act forward to evoke inborn species-specific behavior. These results challenge longstanding views of hedonic learning and must be incorporated into contemporary learning theory.

中文翻译：

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重新考虑食物奖励，大脑刺激和多巴胺：激励措施向前迈进。

在操作性调节中，老鼠按下操纵杆和鸽子啄食的钥匙取决于偶然的食物强化。食物奖励与斯金纳的行为主义，本科教科书和民间心理学相吻合。但是，近一个世纪的实验证据表明，操作性调节室内的食物会向前运动以引起特定物种的进食行为，而不是向后运动以增强实验者定义的反应。此外，最近在神经科学中的发现一致地表明，颅内刺激奖励中心和多巴胺释放（拟议的奖励分子）也可以唤起先天性物种特有的行为。这些结果挑战了享乐主义学习的长期观点，必须将其纳入当代学习理论中。