Choice for conditioned reinforcers in the signaled absence of primary reinforcement.
Brief stimuli tied to past reinforcement can keep choice going even when the main payoff is still far away.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers let pigeons pick between two keys.
Each key gave a two-second colored light before food.
Food never came right away; only the brief light appeared.
Birds could still choose the key that had been paired with more food earlier.
What they found
The pigeons kept pecking the key with the richer light history.
Even with no immediate food, the tiny light alone kept their choice alive.
This shows the light had become a conditioned reinforcer.
How this fits with other research
Iwata (1988) got the same result by delaying the light instead of removing food.
Together the studies prove timing of feedback, not food, steers choice.
Lazar (1977) moved the idea to skill learning: brief lights sped up new response chains in pigeons.
Boudreau et al. (2015) later found children also work for choice itself, but the effect fades if payoffs drift.
The animal and human data line up: brief, informative stimuli can reinforce on their own.
Why it matters
You can strengthen client responding with tiny, distinctive cues.
Use a quick chime, color, or check-mark right after each correct response.
Keep the cue short and pair it early with good outcomes.
Later you can stretch the time to the bigger reinforcer and the cue will carry the load.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Pigeons responded in a multiple schedule in which concurrent schedules of brief-stimulus presentation alternated with a component in which food was available (concurrent-chains component). In the initial links of the concurrent-chains component subjects chose either of two stimuli each correlated with the terminal link of one chain. The terminal links involved either variable-interval 30-second or variable-interval 60-second schedules. In the brief-stimulus component subjects chose between 0.5-second presentations of the terminal-link stimuli from the concurrent-chains component. Responding was generally maintained in the brief-stimulus component in two subjects for more than 300 sessions, suggesting that brief stimuli were conditioned reinforcers. During the brief-stimulus component, in 17 of 21 cases for which a minimal number of responses occurred, choice proportions above 0.55 were obtained for the brief-stimulus presentations correlated with the higher rate of primary reinforcement in the concurrent-chains component. These results support the suggestion that choice in conventional concurrent-chains procedures is partially controlled by production of the terminal-link stimuli.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1984 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1984.41-193