How should periods without social interaction be scheduled? Children's preference for practical schedules of positive reinforcement.
Children choose and work best under a mixed schedule that alternates immediate praise with brief periods of no attention.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked 12 first-graders to play a computer game for social attention.
Kids could pick how the attention came: right away every time, later in one big chunk, or on a mixed schedule—one press earned praise, the next press did nothing.
The children tried each setup for a few minutes, then told the researchers which one they wanted to repeat.
What they found
Every child chose the mixed schedule. They pressed fastest there too.
Even when the other options promised the same total minutes of attention, kids still voted for the on-again-off-again pattern.
How this fits with other research
Dukhayyil et al. (1973) saw the same thing fifty years ago: children flock to schedules that give quick, sure rewards.
Sainsbury (1971) showed that lights paired with praise become mini-reinforcers themselves; C et al. build on that by letting the kids vote with their feet.
Waldron et al. (2023) used high-probability requests to help autistic children start hard tasks. Both studies land on the same rule—break work into small, clear wins and kids move faster.
Why it matters
If you want steady work without burning out your attention supply, run a mixed schedule: deliver praise or tokens right away, then pause, then deliver again. Let the learner see the contrast. The pause makes the next reward feel bigger, so responding stays strong and the child actually prefers the routine. Try it during discrete-trial drills, homework time, or chores. You may find you need less total reinforcement for the same punch of productivity.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Several studies have shown that children prefer contingent reinforcement (CR) rather than yoked noncontingent reinforcement (NCR) when continuous reinforcement is programmed in the CR schedule. Preference has not, however, been evaluated for practical schedules that involve CR. In Study 1, we assessed 5 children's preference for obtaining social interaction via a multiple schedule (periods of fixed-ratio 1 reinforcement alternating with periods of extinction), a briefly signaled delayed reinforcement schedule, and an NCR schedule. The multiple schedule promoted the most efficient level of responding. In general, children chose to experience the multiple schedule and avoided the delay and NCR schedules, indicating that they preferred multiple schedules as the means to arrange practical schedules of social interaction. In Study 2, we evaluated potential controlling variables that influenced 1 child's preference for the multiple schedule and found that the strong positive contingency was the primary variable.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 2014 · doi:10.1002/jaba.140