DRL escape: effects of minimum duration and intensity of electric shock.
Escape contingencies let you dial in response timing by adjusting how long the aversive lasts, not how strong it feels.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Rats pressed a lever on a DRL 20-s schedule. If they pressed too soon they got a brief electric shock. The shock stayed on until the rat waited the required time. The team varied how long the shock could last and how strong it was.
They wanted to know which factor—duration or intensity—really controlled the pause between presses.
What they found
Longer minimum shock durations made the rats wait longer before pressing again. Higher shock intensity did almost nothing to the pause. Duration, not intensity, set the clock.
Response timing grew in step with the required shock length.
How this fits with other research
HOLZ et al. (1963) first showed that punishment intensity alone can wipe out short IRTs on DRL. Barton (1970) flips the contingency: escape from shock now drives the pause, and duration—not intensity—does the work. The two papers sit side-by-side; one shows intensity works when shock is pure punishment, the other shows duration matters when shock can be escaped.
Kelly (1973) later found that intensity × duration multiplicatively controls free-operant avoidance. Barton (1970) narrows this: on DRL-escape, only duration moves the needle. The schedules, not the math, decide which parameter counts.
Carter et al. (2016) took the escape idea into therapy rooms. Higher rates of negative reinforcement made children’s task completion persist longer. The lab finding—that escape can be finely timed—now guides how we pace demands with kids who have escape-maintained problem behavior.
Why it matters
When you shape wait-time or build tolerance for hard tasks, think duration, not size of the aversive. Let the client escape, but only after a clear, longer pause. You can stretch the pause bit-by-bit by extending the required wait, even while keeping the demand mild.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Three dogs were exposed to a DRL-escape procedure that required them to endure a minimum duration of electric shock without responding in order for a response to terminate that shock. When this minimum duration increased from 0 to either 2.25 or 7.00 sec, response latencies increased proportionately. With the minimum duration held constant at 2.25 sec, a gradual increase in shock intensity to 5.0 ma had no systematic effect upon latencies. Even under the highest shock intensity, 5.0 ma, latency and interresponse-time distributions were unimodal with very few latencies and interresponse times less than the minimum duration. Three additional dogs were exposed to an escape procedure in which every response was immediately reinforced. For these subjects, the same increase in shock intensity to 5.0 ma was accompanied by a decrease in latencies. The precise temporal spacing of responses obtained with the DRL-escape procedure may in part be due to the fact that every response latency and interresponse time that did not meet the minimum duration was not only extinguished but was also punished.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1970 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1970.13-41