Choice, rate of reinforcement, and the changeover delay
Alan Silberberg,Edmund Fantino +1 more
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The present study shows that equality between proportions of responses and proportions of reinforcements ("matching") is obtained when the value of the changeover delay is varied.Abstract:
Pigeons distribute their responses on concurrently available variable-interval schedules in the same proportion as reinforcements are distributed on the two schedules only when a changeover delay is used. The present study shows that this equality between proportions of responses and proportions of reinforcements (“matching”) is obtained when the value of the changeover delay is varied. When responses are partitioned into the set of rapid response bursts occurring during the delay interval and the set of responses occurring subsequently, the proportion of neither set of responses matches the proportion of reinforcements. Instead, each set deviates from matching but in opposite directions. Matching on the gross level results from the interaction of two patterns evident in the local response rates: (I) the lengthening of the changeover delay response burst is accompanied by a commensurate decrease in the number of changeovers; (2) the changeover delay response burst is longer than the scheduled delay duration. When delay responses are eliminated by introducing a blackout during the delay interval, response matching is eliminated; the pigeon, however, continues to match the proportion of time spent responding on a key to the proportion of reinforcements obtained on that key.read more
Citations
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Concurrent Operant Performance in Humans: Matching When Food is the Reinforcer
W. F. Buskist,H. L. Miller +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the applicability of the matching law in describing human behavior in concurrent operant situations and extend the generality of matching law to include consummatory behavior in humans was confirmed.
Journal ArticleDOI
On the form of the relation between response rates in a multiple schedule.
TL;DR: The form of the function relating response rates is discussed in relation to findings on rate-dependent effects of drugs, chaining, and the relation between response rate and reinforcement rate in single-schedule conditions.
Journal ArticleDOI
Changeover delay and concurrent‐schedule performance in domestic hens
TL;DR: Responding, particularly after the changeover delay, was well predicted by an equation based on a reinforcer-loss model, and post-changeover-delay responding was more sensitive to reinforcement-rate changes than was total responding.
Journal ArticleDOI
Concurrent-schedule performance in dairy cows : persistent undermatching
TL;DR: Undermatching in dairy cows is not the result of using different foods under alternative schedules or differential pausing under those schedules, and slopes of regression lines relating behavioral outputs to environmental inputs characteristically were below 0.6, which agrees with prior findings.
Journal ArticleDOI
On the functions of the changeover delay
TL;DR: The results suggest that changeover delays function to separate responses on one key from reinforcers on the other or to delay reinforcement for changing over, and the distribution of responding during and after the changeover delay may vary considerably without affecting matching.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Relative and absolute strength of response as a function of frequency of reinforcement
TL;DR: The present experiment is a study of strength of response of pigeons on a concurrent schedule under which they peck at either of two response-keys and investigates output as a function of frequency of reinforcement.
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Preference and Switching under Concurrent Scheduling.
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Concurrent performances: reinforcement interaction and response independence.
TL;DR: When a pigeon's pecks on two keys were reinforced concurrently by two independent variable-interval (VI) schedules, one for each key, the response rate on either key was given by the equation: R(1)=R(1)/(r(1)+r(2))(5/6), where R is response rate, r is reinforcement rate, and the subscripts 1 and 2 indicate keys 1 and 1.
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Changeover delay and concurrent schedules: some effects on relative performance measures
TL;DR: The pigeon and the rat partition total response output between both schedules of a concurrent variable-interval pair is studied and the quantitative nature of a partition seems critically dependent on the relative rates with which the two schedules provide reinforcements for responding, in addition to the changeover delay.