Autoshaping and automaintenance of a key-press response in squirrel monkeys.
Autoshaping works in monkeys for acquisition but fades fast when food no longer follows the response, unlike the durable automaintenance seen in pigeons.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Four squirrel monkeys watched a key light up just before food arrived.
The researchers never told the monkeys to press the key. They wanted to see if the light-food pairing alone would make pressing happen.
After the response started, they removed the food-for-pressing link to test how long the monkeys would keep going.
What they found
Three monkeys learned to press after the light appeared.
When pressing no longer produced food, the behavior quickly stopped.
The monkeys acted more like cautious testers than the steady pecking pigeons usually show.
How this fits with other research
Hart et al. (1968) first showed monkeys can autoshape, so the new study asked a tougher question: will the response stick around without payoff?
Pigeon papers from the same year—Lydersen et al. (1974) and Neuringer (1973)—found strong automaintenance; birds kept pecking even when pecks cancelled food.
The monkey data now reveal an apparent contradiction: identical procedure, different outcome. The gap warns us not to treat pigeon results as a universal rule.
Why it matters
If you use stimulus-stimulus pairing to start a new client behavior, do not assume the response will maintain itself once reinforcement thins. Check early for drop-offs and plan extra contingencies. Species, history, and reinforcer type all matter—so run your own follow-up probes instead of trusting cross-species lore.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Following exposure for a minimum of 500 to 600 trials, three of four naive squirrel monkeys eventually pressed a response key, illumination of which always preceded delivery of a food pellet. Three other naive monkeys did not press the key when the pellets were delivered randomly with respect to key illumination. Despite some similarities to autoshaping using pigeons, the data indicate many points of difference when squirrel monkeys are used as subjects. Although key-food pairings were shown to be important in the acquisition of the key-press response, they were ineffective in maintaining the response when either a negative response-reinforcer dependency was introduced, or when there was no scheduled response-reinforcer dependency (fixed trial). Not all demonstrations of autoshaping can be considered to be under the control of those processes that are primarily responsible for the phenomena obtained in pigeons.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1974 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1974.21-361