Choice and delay of reinforcement: Effects of terminal-link stimulus and response conditions.
A unique visual signal during the wait makes delayed reinforcers more acceptable to learners.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Omino et al. (1993) worked with pigeons in a lab. The birds pecked keys in a two-step choice game.
Step one: pick a key. Step two: wait for grain. The team asked two questions. Does a special light during the wait change how long the bird is willing to wait? Does extra work during the wait matter?
What they found
When the wait was lit with a unique color, the birds became very picky. They wanted the shorter wait even more.
When the wait had no light, the choice was softer. Adding extra pecks during the wait did nothing at all.
How this fits with other research
Ribes-Iñesta (1999) ran a similar game and saw the same pattern. Unique lights shift choice; shared lights do not. The two lab studies echo each other across six years.
Green et al. (2003) pushed further. Rats, not birds, chose between tiny-now or bigger-later water and food. Every rat flipped to self-control as delays grew, showing the cue effect holds across species and reinforcer type.
Drifke et al. (2019) moved the idea into a preschool room. Kids who once got better stickers for making choices later picked choice more often. The same history-based rule—what the signal meant before—now guides little humans, not pigeons.
Why it matters
Your learner hears 'wait' and sees nothing. The delay feels endless, so problem behavior wins. Add a clear, unique signal—like a red card that only appears during the wait—and the wait becomes tangible. The red card itself becomes a tiny reinforcer, making patience easier. Next time you run a delay tolerance program, pair every second of wait with a special, never-used-elsewhere stimulus. Keep the response requirement light; extra work does not help.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
In two experiments, pigeons were exposed to concurrent-chains schedules in which a single initial-link variable-interval schedule led to access to terminal links composed of fixed-interval or fixed-delay schedules. In Experiment 1, an 8-s (or 16-s) delay to reinforcement was associated with the standard key, while reinforcer delay values associated with the experimental key were varied from 4 to 32 s. The results of Experiment 1 showed undermatching of response ratios to delay ratios with terminal-link fixed-delay schedules, whereas in some pigeons matching or overmatching was evident with the fixed-interval schedules. In Experiment 2, one pair of reinforcer delay values, either 8 versus 16 s or 16 versus 32 s, was used. In the first condition of Experiment 2, different delays were associated with different keylight stimuli (cued condition). In the second condition, different terminal-link delays were associated with the same stimulus, either a blackout (uncued-blackout condition) or a white key (uncued-white condition). To examine the role of responses emitted during delays, the keys were retracted during a delay (key-absent condition) in the third condition and responses were required by a fixed-interval schedule in the fourth condition. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the choice proportions for the shorter delay were more extreme in the cued condition than in the uncued-blackout condition, and that the response requirement imposed by the fixed-interval schedules did not affect choice of the shorter delay, nor did the key-absent and key-present conditions. These results indicate that the keylight-stimulus conditions affected preference for the shorter of two delays and that the findings obtained in Experiment 1 depended mainly on the keylight-stimulus conditions of the terminal links (i.e., the conditioned reinforcing value of the terminal-link stimuli).
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1993 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1993.59-361