Interreinforcement time, work time, and the postreinforcement pause.
After food, rats wait longer before working again when the next food is farther away, not when the lever must be held longer.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Six rats pressed a lever that had to stay held down for a set number of seconds.
The longer the required hold, the longer the gap between treats.
Researchers timed how long each rat waited after a treat before pressing again.
What they found
The pause after a treat grew in a straight line as the required hold grew.
Total time between treats predicted the pause better than the actual hold seconds.
Five of the six rats followed this pattern.
How this fits with other research
Capehart et al. (1980) saw the same link between pause and inter-reinforcement time on fixed-ratio and fixed-interval schedules.
Mahoney et al. (1971) first showed pigeons tracking upcoming cyclic intervals; Rider et al. (1984) now show rats doing it under a lever-hold rule.
Tanguay et al. (1982) shortened pauses by adding a timeout after the treat. P et al. lengthened pauses by stretching the hold requirement. Both prove the pause is flexible and rule-bound, not fixed.
Why it matters
If you run a task where the learner must hold, wait, or stay, remember the post-reinforcement pause will grow with the total cycle time.
Schedule breaks or extra prompts when the cycle gets long to keep the session moving.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Time your client’s post-reinforcement pause across two conditions: short wait vs. long wait; add a brief prompt or timer if the pause drifts too long.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Six rats were trained with food deliveries contingent upon their pressing a lever and holding it down for fixed, cumulative durations. Hold requirements were varied from 7.5 seconds to 120 seconds. Lever holding was maintained reliably at hold requirements as long as 30 seconds to 105 seconds for different rats. At longer hold requirements, lever holding was erratic and tended to occur only early in sessions. At shorter and intermediate requirements, the patterns of lever holding resembled those of responding under fixed-ratio schedules for discrete responses, with breaks in responding immediately after reinforcement alternating with relatively continuous lever holding until the next reinforcement. At longer hold requirements, postpause lever holding frequently was interrupted with additional pauses. The duration of postreinforcement pauses increased linearly with the scheduled hold requirement. However, for five of six rats, the hold requirement, which represents the actual time spent lever holding per reinforcer, accounted for somewhat less variance in pause duration than did interreinforcement time.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1984 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1984.42-305