Instinctive drift or instinctual drift is the tendency of an organism to revert to instinctive behaviors that can interfere with the conditioned response. The concept originated with B. F. Skinner's former students Keller and Marian Breland when they tried to teach a raccoon to put money into a piggy bank. Instead the raccoon instinctively drifted to its instinctive behavior of putting money on ground or turning it over in its paws, as they would do with food.
Famous quotes containing the words instinctive and/or drift:
“This instinctive repulsion which tradespeople inspire in men of sensitive feeling is one of the very rare consolations for being so impoverished which are given to those of us who don’t sell anything to anybody.”
—Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961)
“But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)