Concurrent performances: synthesizing rate constancies by manipulating contingencies for a single response.
Stable response rates can be engineered solely by arranging local reinforcement contingencies—no hidden reserve required.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The researcher used one pigeon key instead of the usual two. He added short breaks and a brief delay after each break. The bird still got food for pecking, but the timing changed.
The goal was to see if these small local tweaks could keep the bird’s overall peck rate steady. No second key meant no true second choice.
What they found
The pigeon kept pecking at almost the same speed all day. Tiny pauses and delays acted like a second schedule. Rate stayed flat without any hidden reserve of responses.
How this fits with other research
Lobb et al. (1977) later ran classic two-key concurrent schedules. They saw the same steady rates, proving the single-key trick really copied the two-key effect.
Leigland (2000) blended data from two interval schedules and still saw matching. This shows you can build concurrent results after the fact, just like Catania (1972) built them in real time with one key.
Davison et al. (1989) moved the idea into chain schedules. They showed that changing food rate in one link shifts rates in other links, stretching the rate-constancy rule across longer sequences.
Why it matters
You can steady a client’s response rate without adding extra materials or choices. Insert brief pauses and a short delay after each pause. The person keeps working, but the local schedule evens out bursts and lulls. Try it during fluency drills or DTT sessions when you want smooth, durable pacing.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
An earlier experiment scheduled variable-interval reinforcement for pigeons' pecks on one key, and variable-interval reinforcement alternating with extinction, in a multiple schedule, for pecks on a second key. During the second key's extinction component, first-key pecking was relatively slow and continuous, rarely interrupted by second-key pecking; during the variable-interval component, first-key pecking was frequently interrupted by second-key pecking. When changeover delays operated, so that reinforced pecks on one key could not follow closely upon changeovers from the other key, rapid first-key pecking between interruptions compensated sufficiently for the time lost in second-key pecking that the overall rate of first-key pecking remained roughly constant across the alternating multiple-schedule components. The present experiments duplicated, on a single key, the temporal pattern of first-key pecking generated in the earlier experiments: components of continuous key availability were alternated with components of interrupted key availability. Approximately constant overall rates of responding were observed with a single-key equivalent of a changeover delay scheduled after interruptions and with manipulations of the on-off durations of the interruption cycle. Rate constancies in the original concurrent situation presumably depended on analogous contingencies that operated upon the concurrent responses, rather than on any constant "reserve" of responses.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1972 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1972.17-139