Within the field of evolutionary biology, natural selection is often thought to favor traits that lead to individuals behaving as if they were maximizing their evolutionary fitness. The concept of the individual as a maximizer is also popular in behavioral psychology, especially when it comes to theories of operant learning. Here, the individual is taken to adapt its behavior to the local environment, such that the expected amount of reinforcer value is maximized. Whereas there is a considerable consensus concerning the formal properties of an evolutionary maximand ('fitness'), there is no generally accepted conceptualization of a corresponding behavioral maximand ('reinforcer value'). However, such theoretical clarification is crucial to the development and empirical testing of learning theories, since it is impossible to decide whether the concept of reinforcer maximization is adequate, as long as the maximand is not well defined. This paper presents a formal model of reinforcer value that is consistent with existing work on the nature of reinforcement and provides an explicit link between behavioral psychology and evolutionary biology. Applying the model to matching behavior, it is further demonstrated how the established link between reinforcer value and evolutionary fitness can be used to derive new hypotheses.

中文翻译：

---

强化物价值的进化模型

在进化生物学领域，自然选择通常被认为有利于导致个体表现得好像最大化其进化适应性的特征。个体作为最大化者的概念在行为心理学中也很流行，尤其是在操作学习理论方面。在这里，个体被采取使其行为适应当地环境，从而使强化物值的预期量最大化。尽管对进化准则的形式属性（“适应度”）有相当大的共识，但没有普遍接受的相应行为准则（“强化值”）的概念化。然而，这种理论澄清对于学习理论的发展和实证检验至关重要，因为不可能确定强化物最大化的概念是否足够，只要最大值没有明确定义。本文提出了一种强化物价值的正式模型，该模型与关于强化性质的现有工作一致，并提供了行为心理学和进化生物学之间的明确联系。将该模型应用于匹配行为，进一步证明了如何使用强化物价值和进化适应度之间建立的联系来推导出新的假设。