Acquisition of the autoshaped key peck as a function of amount of preliminary magazine training.

Anger et al. (1976) worked with pigeons. They wanted to know if extra hopper training speeds up key pecking.

Some birds got many hopper trials. Others got few. Then all birds entered autoshaping.

More hopper trials meant faster key-peck learning. Birds first ate from the hopper, then pecked the key.

No bird pecked until it reliably ate when the hopper lit up.

Frost et al. (1996) extends this idea. They kept autoshaping the same but used bigger pellets. Larger pellets made pecking stronger and faster, showing that reinforcer size also matters.

Corrigan et al. (1998) seem to disagree. They found that unsignaled delays cut pecking because birds stared at the hopper instead. Yet both studies highlight the same food-hopper response. The difference is timing: D et al. trained the hopper response first, while W et al. showed what happens when food is delayed later.

Glover et al. (1976) ran a similar pigeon study the same year. They compared serial, delay, and trace autoshaping. Birds learned fastest when key and food were closest in time. Together these papers show that both preliminary training and stimulus contiguity shape how quickly the key peck appears.

You can speed up new skill acquisition by first strengthening the food or token response. Before starting a teaching loop, give extra trials where the learner simply picks up the edible or token. Once that step is fluent, the target response emerges faster and with fewer errors.