Effects of differential probabilities of reinforcement on human timing

Effects of reinforcement during the intertrial interval on temporal discrimination: Location version with rats

“…The RITI manipulation generated an ordered lateral shift of the psychophysical function, a result that is consistent with the findings from studies with human participants and mice as subjects (Akdogan and Balci, 2016a,b;Cambraia et al, 2020). The psychophysical function of RITI disruption shifted to the left.…”

“…Signal detection theory analysis (Green and Swets, 1966;Gescheider, 1997) makes it possible to differentiate whether the changes in any detection task can be attributed to the detectability of stimuli or whether the changes occur at the moment of making a decision or a judgment. For example, if the sensitivity does not change, but response bias does change (Stubbs, 1968;Raslear, 1985;Akdogan and Balci, 2016b;Cambraia et al, 2020), then stimuli are being detected correctly, but changes are occurring at the moment of deciding to categorize a duration as short or long. In the present study, the motivational alteration was very strong since each time that an ITI appeared, reinforcement was delivered, and therefore, the reinforcement value was decreased within the experimental session.…”

“…Human and non-human organisms are capable of discriminating temporal stimuli in different duration ranges, from milliseconds to minutes (Reynolds and Catania, 1962;Stubbs, 1968;Catania, 1970;Allman et al, 2014;Cambraia et al, 2020). The temporal bisection task (Church and Deluty, 1977;Penney and Cheng, 2018) is one of the classic procedures to study temporal discrimination.…”

“…The other category (McClure et al, 2010) implies experimental manipulations that modify the motivation of organisms by altering the value of the reinforcers, for example, allowing access to food during the session, extinction of previously reinforced trials (Ward and Odum, 2006;McClure et al, 2009), pre-feeding, and modifications of the magnitude of reinforcers Kirkpatrick, 2009, 2010) with rats and pigeons; or through changes on probabilities, either reinforcement probabilities or probability of presentation of durations to be discriminated with mice and human participants (Akdogan and Balci, 2016a,b;Cambraia et al, 2020). Within this category, mixed results have been obtained; it has been reported that psychophysical functions exhibit an ordered tendency of temporal underestimation or overestimation as a function of experimental manipulations (Akdogan and Balci, 2016a,b;Cambraia et al, 2020). In other studies, however, although a flattening of the psychophysical functions has been found, which suggests a decrease in the discrimination of the intervals to be estimated, the flattening of the psychophysical function has not been completely ordered (Ward and Odum, 2006;McClure et al, 2009;Galtress and Kirkpatrick, 2010).…”