Attention and temporal discrimination: factors controlling responding under a cyclic-interval schedule.
Without external cues, animals fall back on a simple post-reinforcement pause habit instead of tracking interval length.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The researcher tested pigeons on a repeating cycle of fixed-interval schedules. Each cycle had twelve 1-minute intervals followed by four 3-minute intervals.
He wanted to know if the birds would notice the switch from short to long intervals and change their pecking pattern.
What they found
The pigeons pecked faster during the 3-minute intervals, but not because they counted the minutes. They simply waited the same short time after food, then pecked at a steady speed until the next reward.
The birds ignored the big picture. They just ran the same ‘pause, then go’ routine no matter the interval length.
How this fits with other research
Segal (1962) showed that pigeons can follow visual ‘clocks’ and time perfectly when cues are present. Fantino (1967) removes the cues and shows the birds still time, but only with simple pause-and-run rules.
Cicerone (1976) later confirmed that the more a schedule looks like fixed-interval, the more the birds fall into this rigid pattern. Together, the three studies trace a line: add cues and timing is flexible; remove cues and timing becomes a rote habit.
Bauman et al. (1996) extended this by slowly stretching the interval. Birds kept the pause-and-run habit, but the pause grew with the interval, proving the habit can scale even when the bird still does not ‘understand’ the sequence.
Why it matters
Your clients may also run ‘pause, then go’ routines under fixed schedules. If you change the schedule length but keep the same cues, they might simply stretch the pause, not notice the new rule. To teach true flexibility, add clear signals or vary the context until the pause changes shape.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Pigeons were exposed to a cyclic schedule in which each cycle was composed of twelve 1-min fixed intervals followed by four 3-min fixed intervals; four such cycles comprised an experimental session. The pigeons responded at a much higher average rate during the 3-min intervals than during the 1-min intervals. Other effects were a depression of responding during the first short interval of each cycle and a shortening of postreinforcement pause during the second short interval. The main effect is attributable to a relatively fixed pattern of responding after reinforcement; this pattern consisted in a pause of approximately constant duration followed by responding at an approximately constant rate until the next reinforcement, resulting in much higher average response rates during the longer interreinforcement intervals. The other effects seem attributable to relatively slight differences between the pattern of responding characteristic of later long intervals and the pattern during later short intervals of each cycle. A major implication is that the pigeon is largely insensitive to the sequential properties of many interval-reinforcement schedules. A description of interval-schedule "frustration" phenomena in terms of the inhibitory effects of reinforcement is discussed in relation to these results.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1967 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1967.10-349