Control of responding by location of auditory stimuli: role of differential and non-differential reinforcement.
Differential reinforcement creates sharp auditory location discrimination in just one or two sessions, while non-differential reinforcement produces no control at all.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked whether pigeons could learn to peck a key based only on where a sound came from. One group got food only if they pecked the side that matched the speaker. A second group got food no matter which side they pecked.
Each session lasted about an hour. The birds heard short tones from left or right speakers. The researchers counted correct pecks and wrong pecks across two daily sessions.
What they found
Birds that got food for correct choices hit over 90 % accuracy in one or two sessions. Birds that got food every time never rose above chance. Sound location controlled behavior only when the payoff was different.
Non-differential reinforcement produced no stimulus control at all. The birds acted as if the sound gave them no cue.
How this fits with other research
Davison (2018) extends this idea. He showed that dropping food right after a peck can split control between key color and key location. A three-second delay weakened location control but left color control strong. Together the studies show timing of payoff decides which part of the world the animal listens to.
Horner (1971) seems to contradict our finding. His pigeons got free food every 30 s no matter what they did, and their response rates dropped. Free food weakened stimulus control. The two papers disagree on the surface, but the difference is contingency. P et al. still required a peck; D did not. When the only requirement is time, behavior drifts.
Kisamore et al. (2016) takes our lab rule into the classroom. They used differential reinforcement to teach children with autism to answer questions that had more than one cue. Accuracy jumped, just like our pigeons’ location scores. The principle scales from birds to kids.
Why it matters
If you want a client to notice a subtle cue—an alarm location, a peer’s quiet call, the teacher’s position—you must deliver the good thing only when the response matches that cue. Random praise or steady tokens will not build the discrimination. Check your data after one or two sessions; if accuracy is still flat, tighten the contingency before moving on.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Deliver the reinforcer only when the client orients or moves toward the correct sound source; withhold it for any other response for the first two sessions.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Sound was presented to monkeys through one of two loudspeakers, each adjacent to a response key. A response on the key adjacent to the sound source was reinforced (correct response). A response on the other key produced a timeout (incorrect response). Under these conditions, over 90% of responses were correct within one or two sessions. When the procedure was changed so that a response on either key was reinforced independently of which speaker was sounding, similar control by location developed within one or two sessions. When conditions were modified by moving the keys away from the immediate vicinity of the speakers, the animals required about 20 sessions to reach a stable level of greater than 90% correct responses under differential reinforcement conditions. No control by location developed under nondifferential reinforcement conditions.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1972 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1972.18-453