Automaintenance without stimulus-change reinforcement: Temporal control of key pecks.
Pigeons keep pecking a key even when each peck delays food, proving the signal-food bond alone can drive behavior.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Herrnstein et al. (1979) worked with pigeons in a small lab chamber.
A key lit up before every food delivery.
Pecks postponed both the light change and the grain—so each response delayed reward.
What they found
All birds kept pecking even though every peck made food arrive later.
The timing of their pecks stayed steady, showing the light alone controlled the response.
How this fits with other research
Lydersen et al. (1974) showed earlier that pigeons keep pecking when pecking cancels food.
Together the two papers prove the light-food link, not the food itself, drives the behavior.
Mulvaney et al. (1974) saw a different story: squirrel monkeys stopped responding when food dependency vanished.
The clash is species, not procedure—pigeons maintain, monkeys quit.
Neuringer (1973) first showed that pairing light with food births the key peck; J et al. now show that bond survives even when pecking punishes the bird.
Why it matters
Your client may repeat actions that never earn immediate reward.
Check if a past signal-reward pairing keeps the behavior alive.
If so, break the pair or add a new one instead of chasing instant pay-offs.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Yoked pairs of experimentally naive pigeons were exposed to a modified autoshaping procedure in which key pecking by the leader birds postponed both keylight termination and access to grain for the leader and the follower bird. Key pecking developed and was maintained in all birds and continued through two reversals of roles in the yoked procedure. Although temporal control developed more slowly in follower birds, asymptotic temporal distributions of key pecking were similar for all birds in both leader and follower roles; maximum responding occurred soon after keylight onset and decreased to a minimum prior to reinforcement. Response distributions for both leader and follower birds were described by Killeen's (1975) mathematical model of temporal control. Follower birds received response-independent reinforcement, and the development by these birds of temporal distributions which are minimal immediately prior to reinforcement is without precedent in Pavlovian appetitive conditioning. However, maintenance of key pecking by the leader birds, whose responses postponed both stimulus-change and food reinforcement, supports an interpretation of autoshaped and automaintained key pecking as responding elicited by signaled grain presentation.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1979 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1979.31-395