Attention and psychophysics in the development of stimulus control.
Reinforcement shifts choice first, accurate seeing comes later—give extra trials after rule changes.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers worked with rats in a small lab study. They changed the rules about which lever gave food. The new odds were sudden. The team watched how fast the rats changed their choice pattern.
They also tracked how long it took the rats to tell the two levers apart again. The goal was to see if bias and accuracy move at the same speed.
What they found
The rats flipped their favorite lever right away. Their bias matched the new food odds within moments. But they still made mistakes when the lights looked alike.
Perfect discrimination came back later, after more trials. Quick bias shift, slow accuracy recovery.
How this fits with other research
Meltzer (1983) saw the same split in pigeons. When grain odds changed, the birds' side bias moved fast, yet seeing dim lights stayed hard. The pattern crosses species.
BOLLEHOFFMAN et al. (1964) showed monkeys sped up their release time once differential reinforcement began. Fahmie et al. (2013) extend that idea: reinforcement first bends choice, then sharpens sight.
Cherek et al. (1970) trained rats with tones of different loudness. Both loudness and food odds shape learning, but they act on separate gears in the brain.
Why it matters
Your client may echo the rats. After you change the token chart or praise schedule, the child might pick the new choice fast but still err on tricky looks-alike pictures. Build in extra practice trials for true discrimination. Watch the data: if accuracy lags while bias looks good, the program needs more contrast, not more rules.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →After you alter the token or praise ratio, add ten clear-error-free contrast trials to shore up true stimulus discrimination.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Rats responded in a six-stimulus, two-response temporal classification procedure. A successive-reversal design was used in which the relationship between stimulus class (short vs. long) and correct comparison location (left or right) reversed every 15 sessions. After several reversals, the relative probability of reinforcement for each correct classification was manipulated across subsequent reversals. In each condition, the asymptotic level of preference for the comparison location (response bias) correlated with the greater probability of reinforcement was demonstrated in the first session following a reversal, whereas discrimination accuracy took several more sessions to return to asymptotic levels. A modified version of the attending-augmented Davison-Nevin-Alsop (Davison & Nevin, 1999) model offered by Nevin, Davison, & Shahan (2005) provided an accurate description of the reacquisition data. The comparison-attending parameters remained high and relatively constant following reversals, while sample-attending parameters initially decreased following reversals, and then increased gradually across sessions. These findings support key assumptions of the attending model; sample- and comparison-attending are independent processes that modulate the expression of discriminative control exerted by those stimuli over operant behavior.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 2013 · doi:10.1002/jeab.54