Properties and Function of an Internal Clock

Roberts, Seth

doi:10.1016/s0166-4115(08)61802-6

Cited by 17 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 90 publications

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“…Time was assumed to be a sensory modality like any other, so the experimental task was simply to explore the different kinds of effect, excitatory, inhibitory, discriminatory, that could come under temporal control. The psychophysical view was formalized by Gibbon (1977) in the context of animal studies, and this led to a static information-processing model, scalar expectancy theory (SET: Gibbon & Church 1984, Meck 1983, Roberts 1983, which comprised a pacemaker-driven clock, working and reference memories, a comparator, and various thresholds. A later dynamic version added memory for individual trials (see Gallistel 1990 for a review).…”

Section: The Gap Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Operant Conditioning

Staddon

Cerutti

2003

Annu. Rev. Psychol.

333

213

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Operant behavior is behavior "controlled" by its consequences. In practice, operant conditioning is the study of reversible behavior maintained by reinforcement schedules. We review empirical studies and theoretical approaches to two large classes of operant behavior: interval timing and choice. We discuss cognitive versus behavioral approaches to timing, the "gap" experiment and its implications, proportional timing and Weber's law, temporal dynamics and linear waiting, and the problem of simple chain-interval schedules. We review the long history of research on operant choice: the matching law, its extensions and problems, concurrent chain schedules, and self-control. We point out how linear waiting may be involved in timing, choice, and reinforcement schedules generally. There are prospects for a unified approach to all these areas.

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Section: The Gap Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Operant Conditioning

Staddon

Cerutti

2003

Annu. Rev. Psychol.

333

213

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“…Roberts (1983) combined a time discrimination (respond only at a particular time) with a response discrimination (make one response during one signal, another response during another signal). Six rats were trained to respond for food on a discrete-trial schedule, with trials defined by light or sound.…”

Section: More Evidence For a Distinct Internal Clockmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Figure 18 shows the data in a form helpful for deciding if signal and time had multiplicative effects. (The assignments of light and sound to responses were balanced, and the two modalities had almost identical effects-see Roberts, 1983, for details.) For both types of responses, time and signal were close to multiplicative after the first 30 sec of the signal.…”

Section: More Evidence For a Distinct Internal Clockmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, the clock sends (or receives) pulse-like output to (or from) another process. Earlier evidence (Roberts, 1981(Roberts, , 1983 came only from rats, and revealed nothing about the connection between the clock and other processes. Given the .…”

Section: More Evidence For a Distinct Internal Clockmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Response rate during the chain signal shown as a function of response rate during the lever signal, for different parts of the f"txed interval defined by the signal. Based on previously unpublished data from an experiment described by Roberts (1983). The f"txed interval was 60 sec; each point represents 5 sec.…”

Section: More Evidence For a Distinct Internal Clockmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Evidence for distinct serial processes in animals: The multiplicative-factors method

Roberts

1987

Animal Learning & Behavior

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The assumption that responses are controlled by distinct serially arranged processes was used by Sternberg (1969a) to explain the result, observed in many human experiments, that two factors have additive effects on reaction time (RT). With slight changes, Sternberg's explanation of additive factors with RT also explains the result, observed in animal experiments, that two factors have multiplicative effects on response rate. This article describes and interprets 17 examples of multiplicative factors from response-rate experiments with rats, pigeons, and goldfish, as well as some other animal evidence for distinct serial processes. The examples suggest and/or support new and old ideas about generalization, attention, timing, learning, motivation, and response production. Most important, the animal evidence makes the case for distinct serial processes considerably stronger. Since the procedures used in the two sets of experiments (human and animal) have little in common, distinct serial processes may control behavior in a very wide range of situations.Sternberg (l969a) introduced the additive-factor method (AFM), a guide to designing and interpreting reaction time (RT) experiments, and used the method to show that there was evidence for distinct serially arranged processes (which Sternberg called processing stages) in a number of human RT experiments. The data that he used to illustrate the method are unusual. They come from factorial RT experiments, and the key result, found in a number of experiments, was that pairs of factors (treatments) had close-to-additive effects on mean RT. One unusual feature of the data is the precision of the additivity. In most cases, an additive model fit so well that in graphs of the data, all of the points (representing the data) touched the fitted lines (representing the model). In a few cases, it was not obvious that the lines had not been drawn through the points. Ten of Sternberg's examples provided enough data to calculate the percentage of variance explained by an additive model; on the average (median over the 10 cases), an additive model describes 99.89% of the variance. In one set of experiments, not done with the method in mind, an additive model described RTs with median absolute error of 1.8 msec (median taken over five pairs of factors). In an experiment designed for the method, the errors were .9 msec (one pair offactors) and.4 msec (same pair at a different level of a third factor), with RTs on the order of 500 msec. Sternberg (1971) described 9

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Temporal Discrimination and Forgetting of CS Duration in Conditioned Suppression

Rosas¹,

Alonso²

1996

Learning and Motivation

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Properties and Function of an Internal Clock

Cited by 17 publications

References 90 publications

Operant Conditioning

Operant Conditioning

Evidence for distinct serial processes in animals: The multiplicative-factors method

Temporal Discrimination and Forgetting of CS Duration in Conditioned Suppression

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