Differential reinforcement and stimulus control of not responding.
Paying learners to withhold a response can smear stimulus control—use lean or extinction-based plans when sharp discrimination matters.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Pigeons pecked a key for food. The birds then saw colored lights that told them when pecking would or would not pay off.
The experiment added a twist. Sometimes the birds earned food by not pecking at all. Other times the researchers simply stopped paying for pecks. They wanted to see how these two ways of cutting responding changed the birds’ ability to tell the colors apart.
What they found
Paying birds for staying quiet flattened the color gradient. The birds pecked about the same no matter which light appeared.
Stopping all payment sharpened the gradient. The birds quickly learned to peck only during the color that still paid. Mixing the two methods gave mixed results.
How this fits with other research
Kelley et al. (2017) later showed that free food also weakens desirable responses. Their child and pigeons stopped asking or pecking when snacks arrived too often. Both studies warn that rich reinforcement for doing nothing can blur stimulus control.
Powell et al. (1968) worked the same year with children who had tantrums. They changed task difficulty instead of paying for quiet. Both papers show differential reinforcement can cut responding, but the route matters: task change gives sharp control, paying for silence can flatten it.
Lalli et al. (1995) mapped how extinction arranges responses into a tidy latency ladder with kids who have autism. Their orderliness under extinction backs up the sharp gradient Nevin (1968) saw when payment stopped.
Why it matters
When you want a client to stop a behavior and still notice the cues, do not flood them with rewards for being quiet. Use brief extinction or thin schedules instead. Start with a clear S-delta signal and withhold all reinforcement for the old response. You will get cleaner discrimination and fewer accidental bursts.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Pigeons were trained to respond with equal variable-interval reinforcement in the presence of a white key and also a white key with a vertical line. They were then trained not to respond to the vertical line by extinguishing the response or by reinforcing its non-occurrence at various frequencies. During training, the rate of key-pecking in the presence of the white key, maintained by a constant variable-interval schedule of reinforcement, depended on the frequency of reinforcement in the presence of the line. When lines of different orientations were presented in a generalization test, birds trained with extinction responded more to other orientations than to the vertical line, whereas those trained with high frequencies of reinforcement for not responding tended to respond equally at all line orientations. Intermediate frequencies of reinforcement gave mixed results.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1968 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1968.11-715