Abstract
Persistence in the behavioral study of personality. From a behavioral outlook persistence would be operativized by means of the maintenance of the response rate in an acquisition/extinction task, under a negative reinforcement program. It is argued the need of distinguishing two ways of persistence behavior: (a) learned persistence, in which the subject maintains the learned response during extinction phase, and (b) motivation persistence, in which persistence is shown in different responses looking for alternative solutions. Pavlov System, developed for research on persistence (Santacreu y García-Leal, 2000) is used for analyzing the relationships between persistence, initial motivation and learning. Results show: (1) there is no direct lineal relationship between initial motivation and learning in the end of the acquisition phase, (2) learned and motivation persistence are not correlated and (3) distribution of motivational index discriminates better than the learned persistence index among subjects.
