Human concurrent performances: The effects of experience, instructions, and schedule-correlated stimuli.
Adults need instructions, signals, and single-schedule practice before their choices follow the matching law.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked adults to press two buttons for money. Each button paid on its own schedule. Sometimes the schedules changed.
They added three helpers: earlier single-button practice, colored lights tied to each schedule, and clear rules that one button did not block the other. They checked if these helpers made the adults' presses follow the matching law.
What they found
With all three helpers, the adults' press ratios matched the money ratios. Without them, the neat matching pattern fell apart.
How this fits with other research
Reynolds et al. (1968) showed pigeons match without extra help. The new study says humans need more setup to reach the same tidy numbers.
Leung (1989) used the same lab and adult group but tested schedule splitting, not matching. Both papers agree: human choice needs careful design to echo animal data.
Johnstone et al. (1996) found humans still show bias when pay is equal. Emmelkamp et al. (1986) shows bias can be tamed with training, instructions, and signals. Together they map when humans act like pigeons and when they do not.
Why it matters
If you run concurrent schedules in token boards, choice assessments, or social-skills games, add clear cues and brief rules. A short pre-training on each option helps too. These simple steps turn messy human choice into data you can trust.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
In order to investigate the effects of separate exposures to single schedules, of unique schedule-correlated stimuli, and of independency-informing instructions upon choice under concurrent variable-interval schedules, 28 human subjects were divided into eight groups. Each subject was exposed to a baseline procedure, an experimental procedure, and a return to the baseline procedure. Different combinations of these three manipulations were applied to the different groups only during the experimental phase (except for the independency-informing instructions, which were given to half of the groups at the start of training). For the group of subjects exposed to the combination of all three manipulations, the logarithms of the ratios of response frequencies tended to be linearly related to the logarithms of the ratios of reinforcement frequencies during the experimental phase. These orderly effects were not obtained with subjects in the other groups. The results suggest that human choice was well described by the generalized matching law when the three manipulations were simultaneously in effect, and that unreported differences in the use of these three procedural variables might partly account for contradictions between results in previous studies of human concurrent performance.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1986 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1986.45-257