Pausing as an operant: choice and discriminated responding.
Pausing behaves like any other operant: reinforce it with DRO and it grows; signal it no longer pays and it shrinks.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Ellingsen et al. (2014) asked a simple question: can you treat "doing nothing" as a real response?
They set up a tandem VI-VT DRO 5-s schedule. If the participant paused for five seconds, they got a reinforcer.
Sometimes a light came on to signal that pausing would pay off. Sometimes it did not.
What they found
Pausing went up when the DRO contingency was active.
It went down again when the light signaled that pausing no longer paid.
The result shows pausing is an operant: you can reinforce it or extinguish it just like pressing a lever.
How this fits with other research
Craig et al. (2024) swapped pausing for ethanol-seeking lever presses. The same nondrug DRO schedule still cut the target response. This conceptual replication says the pausing effect is not a lab oddity; it holds across very different response classes.
Cox et al. (2017) moved the idea into an MRI suite. They used progressive DRO to shape longer and longer stillness in children with autism and ID. The schedule logic is identical to R et al., but the payoff was motionless lying good enough for brain scans.
Laposa et al. (2017) extended the logic to detained teens. DRL reinforced "quiet compliance" instead of pausing. Problem behavior dropped to near zero. Again, reinforcing the absence of a response produced a socially important gain.
Why it matters
If pausing is an operant, so is staying seated, keeping hands down, or waiting before speaking. You can build these skills with simple DRO or DRL schedules. Start with short intervals, reinforce the absence, and stretch the time as the learner succeeds. No extinction of the problem response is required; just pay for the quiet.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The effects of intermittent schedules of reinforcement for pausing were evaluated in two experiments. In Experiment 1, across a series of conditions, a variable-interval (VI) baseline schedule, in which pigeons' key pecks produced food, alternated with conditions in which food was delivered according to a concurrent VI (for key pecking) tandem variable-time differential-reinforcement-of-other-behavior (DRO) 5-s schedule. Time spent pausing within a session was proportional to the reinforcement rates associated with the tandem schedule. To examine the control of pausing by antecedent events, Experiment 2 arranged a multiple schedule in which pecking and pausing in either component were maintained according to concurrent schedules like those used in the first experiment. The availability of reinforcement for pausing was signaled in one component while signals uncorrelated with reinforcement were presented in the other. Signaled reinforcement for pausing, relative to the presentation of uncorrelated signals, decreased time spent pausing, a finding consistent with existing research on the effects of signaled VI reinforcement for key pecking in pigeons. The results of the two experiments show that pausing functions as an operant in much the same way that discrete responses, like key pecks, do, and that pausing and other operants are similarly affected by both antecedent and consequent events.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 2014 · doi:10.1002/jeab.73