OBSERVING BEHAVIOR DURING INTERVAL SCHEDULES¹

Abstract

Experiment 1 showed that the three stimuli associated with three chained fixed-interval links could be used to maintain observing behavior. Experiment 2 showed that three stimuli correlated with the passage of time since the last reinforcement in a fixed-interval schedule could be used to maintain observing behavior. In both experiments most observing responses occurred midway between reinforcements. Few occurred just before or just after reinforcement. Experiment 3 showed that the decline in the rate of observing behavior just before reinforcement was reduced when more stimuli could be observed. The relatively high terminal rate of observing behavior that resulted was maintained even when at least 4 sec intervened between the reinforcement and the last observed stimulus.

Reinforcement of behavior with cues correlated with extinction

“…The critical factor in this reinforcement may have been the information provided by the discriminative stimuli on the reinforcement contingency. Such an effect would be closely related to the observing behavior recently reported for various segments of the inter-reinforcement interval in a fixed-interval schedule (Hendry & WillOW, 1966).…”

CUE‐PRODUCING BEHAVIOR IN THE CAPUCHIN MONKEY DURING REVERSAL, EXTINCTION, ACQUISITION, AND OVERTRAINING1

“…One view is that perceptual activities are reinforced by uncertainty reduction, i.e., by the information provided by veridical perception of the environment. This kind of interpretation can accommodate the experiments in which an observing response serves to transform a schedule from a less predictable to a more predictable one, for example, from a mixed to a multiple schedule (e.g., Kelleher et al, 1962) or a tandem to a chain (e.g., Hendry and Dillow, 1966).…”

“…In one class of experiments, the observing response, though not associated with differential "primary" reinforcement, produces information (discriminative cues) which may provide the source of reinforcement for the observing behavior. For example, the fact that a pigeon continues to peck a key when the only consequence of this action is to produce a stimulus which provides information concerning the schedule in force on a second key (e.g., Hendry and Dillow, 1966;Kelleher, Riddle, and Cook, 1962), may be interpreted in terms of the conditionecl reinforcement arising from the response-produced stimuli. Experiments showing that rats learn to choose the side of an E-maze which provides information concerning the availability of reward, rather than the side on which the reinforcement schedule is precisely the same but without the information cue (e.g., Mitchell, Perkins, and Perkins, 1965;Prokasy, 1956), are also interpretable in terms of conditioned reinforcement.…”

SOME EFFECTS OF RESPONSE‐DEPENDENT CLOCK STIMULI IN A FIXED‐INTERVAL SCHEDULE1

“…Such a stimulus change is called a "clock" (Ferster and Skinner, 1957). Frequently, a discontinuous clock is used where stimulus changes divide the interval into equal portions, for instance, equal quarters or thirds (Segal, 1962;Hendry and Dillow, 1966). An example of a discontinuous clock would be a fixed-interval schedule where a red light was displayed to the subject during the first minute, a yellow light during the second minute and a green light in the third minute of a 3-min interval.…”