Compounding of discriminative stimuli from the same and different sensory modalities.
Mixing senses in your cues gets stronger behavior than using two sights or two sounds.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Shull (1971) worked with lab rats in a standard lever box.
The rats earned food by pressing during two cues.
One cue was a tone plus a light.
Another cue was two lights of different brightness.
The team counted presses to see which compound worked better.
What they found
Rats pressed most when the tone and light came together.
Two lights together helped less, and only for a few sessions.
Cross-modal mixes gave stronger, longer-lasting control.
How this fits with other research
Guerrero et al. (2021) later saw the same boost in people.
They taught adults simple sound-picture pairs, then tested new links.
The earlier rat finding held: mixing senses beats using one.
Nevin (1969) first showed that any compound lifts control.
That study used color plus tilt, both visual.
Shull (1971) widened the idea by proving mixing senses helps even more.
Why it matters
When you design cues for a client, pair a sound with a sight.
Try a clicker plus a green card to signal "good job."
The mix should grab attention faster and last longer than a double visual cue.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Rats' responding was maintained by fixed-interval schedules of reinforcement in the presence of a tone or two separate lights. The lights were either of low, moderate, or high intensity. Compounds of these single discriminative stimuli each maintained a greater frequency of response than did the single stimuli, and the compound composed of stimuli from different sensory modalities (light+tone) maintained a greater level of responding than did the compound composed of stimuli from the same sensory modality (light+light). Combining lights of different intensity had no differential effect on responding. However, in the second experiment, a compound composed of a light and a tone, each of greater intensity than the light and tone of another compound, initially maintained a higher frequency of response, demonstrating intensity effects during stimulus compounding when the increase in intensity occurs through the component stimuli. This intensity effect, however, was only transitory.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1971 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1971.16-337