"Automaintenance": the role of reinforcement.
Free food alone won’t make clients respond; watch for accidental sensory pay-offs that truly keep the behavior alive.
01Research in Context
What this study did
R et al. put eight hungry pigeons in a box with a small lighted key.
Every minute, grain dropped into the cup no matter what the bird did.
The key light blinked off for two seconds right after each food delivery.
The team watched for 40 daily sessions to see if the birds would peck the key even though pecking never produced food.
What they found
Most birds never pecked. Two birds pecked a little, but only when the light turned off.
When the researchers made the light stay on instead of blinking off, the pecking stopped.
The birds were reacting to the light change, not to the free food.
How this fits with other research
Horner (1971) saw the opposite in rats. Free food dropped every minute and the rats pressed a lever more, not less. The difference: the rats’ lever stopped a loud noise, so the noise offset kept the pressing alive.
Berler et al. (1982) also got more lever presses with rats when a tone came before free food. Again, the tone worked like a green light that told the rat food was coming, so the schedule effect (DRL) was broken.
All three studies show the same rule: if a stimulus change helps the animal predict or escape something, behavior can rise even when food is free.
Why it matters
Automaintenance sounds like an easy way to create behavior, but it rarely works. Before you call a response "self-reinforced," test what the client actually gets from it. Turn off the sensory change or cover the toy and see if the behavior stays. If it drops, you have found the real reinforcer—and the real lever to build or fade a skill.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
A key was illuminated on the average of every 30 sec for a duration of 6 sec and this was followed by food presentations. When key pecks in the presence of the light produced immediate access to grain (autoshaping procedure) pigeons were likely to peck. When pecks terminated the keylight but prevented access to grain (automaintenance procedure) pigeons were much less likely to peck. Seven of 12 pigeons failed to develop responding during the automaintenance procedure. Four of the five pigeons that responded during the automaintenance procedure were exposed to a procedure in which responses could not immediately terminate the light. Three of the four ceased to respond during optimal automaintenance conditions, suggesting that the response-dependent offset of the keylight had been reinforcing their pecking. Responding during the automaintenance procedure was eliminated for a fifth pigeon by eliminating the contiguity of light-offset and food-onset on those trials in which the pigeon did not peck. These results suggest that: (1) automaintenance (unlike autoshaping) is not an effective procedure for reliably generating responding; (2) responding that does occur during the automaintenance procedure is reinforced by the response-dependent offset of the keylight.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1974 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1974.21-117