Control of responding by location of auditory stimuli: rapid acquisition in monkey and rat.
Place the reinforcer at the exact spot where the target response occurs to speed up learning.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers worked with monkeys and rats in a lab. They played sounds from different spots. The animals had to touch the spot where the sound came from.
Some animals got food right at the sound source. Others got food far away from the sound. The team counted how many tries it took to learn the game.
What they found
Monkeys who got food at the sound source learned in 0-3 sessions. Monkeys who got food far away needed 14-20 sessions.
Rats showed the same pattern. Nearby food made learning fast. Far food made learning slow.
How this fits with other research
Horner (1971) showed bats can learn sound tasks too. This extends the monkey finding to a new species.
Weiss (1968) and Nevin (1968) proved monkeys can learn other tricky tasks before this study. They set the stage for testing auditory control.
Griesi-Oliveira et al. (2013) found delayed rewards slow rat learning. This matches the far-reinforcement group in Sanders et al. (1971). Both show timing matters.
McGonigle et al. (1982) showed pigeons learn faster with immediate signals. This supports the core idea: keep the reinforcer close to the target response.
Why it matters
When you teach a child to follow directions or find objects, deliver the reward right where the skill happens. If you're teaching a student to touch a picture when they hear its name, give the treat at the picture, not at your seat. This simple move can cut training time from weeks to days.
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Move your reinforcer delivery spot to within 6 inches of where the child should respond.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Monkeys require a considerably larger number of trials to bring responding under the control of the location of an auditory stimulus than cats, rats, and bats with the same experimental procedures. The present experiment sought to determine the conditions necessary for rapid acquisition of control of responding by location of noise and tone bursts in the monkey. Monkeys were run in an enclosure that contained four loudspeakers and four manipulanda. Two conditions were used in training. In the adjacent condition, a stimulus (noise or tone burst) was presented through one or other of two speakers and a response on the manipulandum adjacent to the speaker was reinforced with food. In the nonadjacent condition, a stimulus was presented through one of two speakers and a response on a manipulandum remote from the speaker was reinforced with food. Acquisition of control was measured by change in the percentage of reinforced responses during training. In the adjacent condition, responding came under control of location within zero to three sessions. In nonadjacent conditions, the animals required 14 to 20 sessions to come under control of location. These latter numbers are comparable to those reported in the literature for localization discrimination in monkeys.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1971 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1971.15-379