Human observing: maintained by negative informative stimuli only if correlated with improvement in response efficiency.
Bad-news cues only keep attention if they let the learner respond more efficiently.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked college students to press keys for money.
Some keys paid more, some paid less.
Before each round, students could look at a light that told them which key paid more.
The catch: sometimes the light only showed the bad option.
The researchers wanted to know if people would still look when the news was bad.
What they found
People kept watching the light only when it helped them work faster.
If the bad-news light gave no speed edge, they stopped looking.
Good-news lights were always watched.
The result favors the idea that signals become reinforcers, not just uncertainty killers.
How this fits with other research
Jenkins et al. (1973) first saw the same pattern in pigeons years earlier.
Their birds also pecked more at lights that signaled food, showing the rule holds across species.
Thomson (1974) seemed to disagree: pigeon looking peaked at medium uncertainty and dropped at certainty.
The clash fades when you see C used pure probability while A et al. added a response-efficiency twist; both can be true.
Luckett et al. (2002) later showed rats also avoid bad-news signals, proving the selective-observing effect is general.
Why it matters
When you give signals about upcoming tasks, tie them to faster or easier responding.
A red card that only says "hard task ahead" will lose its power unless it also shows a shortcut.
Pair even bad news with a helpful next step and your learner will keep paying attention.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Two experiments investigated the effect of observing responses that enabled college students to emit more efficient distributions of reinforced responses. In Experiment 1, the gains of response efficiency enabled by observing were minimized through use of identical low-effort response requirements in two alternating variable-interval schedules. These comprised a mixed schedule of reinforcement; they differed in the number of money-backed points per reinforcer. In each of three choices between two stimuli that varied in their correlation with the variable-interval schedules, the results showed that subjects preferred stimuli that were correlated with the larger average amount of reinforcement. This is consistent with a conditioned-reinforcement hypothesis. Negative informative stimuli--that is, stimuli correlated with the smaller of two rewards--did not maintain as much observing as stimuli that were uncorrelated with amount of reward. In Experiment 2, savings in effort made possible by producing S- were varied within subjects by alternately removing and reinstating the response-reinforcement contingency in a mixed variable-interval/extinction schedule of reinforcement. Preference for an uncorrelated stimulus compared to a negative informative stimulus (S-) decreased for each of six subjects, and usually reversed when observing permitted a more efficient temporal distribution of the responses required for reinforcement; in this case, the responses were pulls on a relatively high-effort plunger. When observing the S- could not improve response efficiency, subjects again chose the control stimulus. All of these results were inconsistent with the uncertainty-reduction hypothesis.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1985 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1985.43-289