Fixed-ratio punishment.
Intermittent punishment on a fixed-ratio schedule suppresses behavior slowly and incompletely compared with continuous punishment, while still producing steady local response bursts.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Scientists set up a small box with a lever. Rats pressed the lever for food. Every tenth press also earned a brief electric shock. This is called fixed-ratio punishment: a consequence follows only some responses.
The team then ran the same rats under continuous punishment. Now every lever press produced a shock. They compared how fast each setup stopped the rats from pressing.
What they found
Fixed-ratio punishment worked slowly. Response rates fell a little each day but never reached zero. Continuous punishment cut pressing almost right away.
Between shocks the rats kept a steady, moderate pace. Changing the shock strength or the ratio size did not alter this local rate. The animals acted as if they 'expected' the next shock after a set number of presses.
How this fits with other research
McKearney (1970) later showed the same fixed-ratio burst pattern can appear even when the shock itself is the scheduled event, not a punishment add-on. Together the two papers prove that ratio schedules stamp in stable response runs no matter what the consequence does to overall rates.
Hamilton et al. (1978) found one response could be punished by shock while a second response was reinforced by the same shock. Their result supports the target paper: punishment depends on the contingency, not the stimulus. Shock is not 'bad'; the schedule gives it meaning.
Rojahn et al. (1994) used money and cigarettes instead of shock. Raising the ratio size reduced responding more for money than for cigarettes. The 1963 punishment data mirror this price sensitivity: when punishment is intermittent (higher ratio) its suppressive 'price' is weaker, so behavior persists.
Why it matters
If you deliver a reprimand, response cost, or brief restraint only after every third or fifth instance, do not expect quick suppression. Behavior will drop gradually and stabilize above zero. For rapid reduction you need to follow nearly every response with the punisher. When you must use intermittent punishment, track local response rates between consequences; they reveal whether the contingency is still clear to the learner.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Responses were maintained by a variable-interval schedule of food reinforcement. At the same time, punishment was delivered following every nth response (fixed-ratio punishment). The introduction of fixed-ratio punishment produced an initial phase during which the emission of responses was positively accelerated between punishments. Eventually, the degree of positive acceleration was reduced and a uniform but reduced rate of responding emerged. Large changes in the over-all level of responding were produced by the intensity of punishment, the value of the punishment ratio, and the level of food deprivation. The uniformity of response rate between punishments was invariant in spite of these changes in over-all rate and contrary to some plausible a priori theoretical considerations. Fixed-ratio punishment also produced phenomena previously observed under continuous punishment: warm-up effect and a compensatory increase. This type of intermittent punishment produced less rapid and less complete suppression than did continuous punishment.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1963 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1963.6-141