Increased reinforcement when timeout from avoidance includes access to a safe place.
A safe place during timeout can accidentally strengthen the very behavior you want to decrease.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers worked with rats in a small chamber. The rats could press a lever to avoid mild electric shocks.
Sometimes the rats got a timeout from the task. During timeout, half the rats could climb onto a tiny safe shelf. The other half sat on the regular grid floor.
The team counted how many lever presses each group made. They wanted to know if the shelf changed how hard the rats worked.
What they found
Rats that could climb onto the shelf during timeout pressed the lever more often. The shelf acted like a reward, even though it did not reduce the number of shocks.
The safe place itself became a reinforcer. Just reaching the shelf kept the avoidance behavior strong.
How this fits with other research
Wilkie et al. (1981) got the same result with sound instead of a shelf. A tone that meant “no shock coming” also kept rats responding. Both studies show safety signals can reinforce behavior through different senses.
Clark et al. (1973) looked at timeout with preschool children. They found timeout suppressed disruption. That seems opposite to the shelf study, but the difference is function. For kids, timeout removed fun things, so it punished. For rats, the shelf added safety, so it rewarded. Same procedure, two roles.
Lewis et al. (1976) showed rats prefer signaled shock when the safety cue is reliable. The shelf study extends this idea: not only do rats prefer safety cues, they will work harder to reach them.
Why it matters
When you use timeout, notice what the client can access. A quiet corner with soft pillows may reward escape behavior instead of reducing it. Test the effect: record response rates before and after you add or remove “safe” items. If problem behavior increases, the timeout spot may be reinforcing. Swap it for a neutral area or remove the cozy items until you see a drop in the target behavior.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Remove soft toys or preferred seating from the timeout area for one week and chart the target behavior.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Three experiments investigated the reinforcing value of access to a safe place during timeout from an avoidance schedule. Rats were trained on conjoint schedules in which responding both postponed shock on a free-operant avoidance schedule and produced periods of timeout on fixed-ratio schedules. In some conditions, a shelf was inserted into the operant chamber during timeout, enabling subjects to get off the grid floor. The combination of timeout and shelf maintained substantially higher response rates than the baseline avoidance schedule with ratio requirements as high as 90 (Experiment I). Adding the shelf to timeouts in one component of multiple fixed-ratio schedules of timeout resulted in higher response rates in the component where the shelf was included (Experiment II). When timeouts with and without the shelf were arranged on concurrent schedules, the shelf-timeout combination was preferred, even when of shorter duration than timeout alone (Experiment III). In all three experiments, subjects climbed on the shelf, although all shocks were cancelled during timeout periods. The results could not be accounted for solely in terms of the reinforcing properties of changes in shock rates, but required an interpretation that ascribed conditioned reinforcing value to stimuli associated with such changes.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1977 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1977.27-479