Reinforcement of mediating behavior on a spaced-responding schedule.
Add a brief, signaled mediating response to DRL schedules to help clients pause accurately.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team built a two-link chain for rats on a DRL 60-s schedule.
Pressing a small mediating lever first lit a white lamp.
That lamp then acted as a conditioned reinforcer for the final lever press.
They wanted to see if this tiny extra step would sharpen timing.
What they found
Timing got tighter when the mediating lever was in place.
When they lengthened the DRL or flipped the order, the chain fell apart.
The conditioned reinforcer alone kept the pause cleaner than food alone.
How this fits with other research
Schwartz et al. (1971) later saw the same boost with pigeons.
They used a non-contingent side key instead of a lever, yet accuracy jumped from below 10 % to 75 %.
The two studies line up: an extra response locus acts like a timer.
Fantino (1969) looked closer and found collateral behavior only sticks if it earns a clear stimulus, not by accident.
That supports the 1963 rule: the white lamp had to be programmed, not random.
Rees et al. (1967) tinkered with chained versus tandem stimuli in second-order DRL.
They showed that how you insert the external cue changes early response rates.
Together the four papers say: give the animal something to do or see mid-interval, and the pause smooths out.
Why it matters
If a client rushes answers or hits the button too soon, insert a quick mediating step.
Have them touch a colored card or say a word before the real response.
That tiny chain becomes its own cue to wait, just like the white lamp did for the rats.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This paper describes a procedure for gaining experimental control over mediating behavior on a spaced-responding schedule of food reinforcement. Three rats, food-deprived, were trained on a DRL 16 sec schedule of food reinforcement. Then, a concurrent schedule of food reinforcement was introduced on a second (mediating) lever, such that the first response to occur on the mediating lever, after the DRL interval had timed out, was reinforced with food, as was the next response to occur on the DRL lever. Reinforcement via the mediating lever became a discriminative stimulus for a food-reinforcement opportunity on the DRL lever. Next, food reinforcement for the mediating behavior was replaced by a conditioned reinforcer consisting of onset of a buzzer signaling timing-out of the DRL interval. Under these conditions, chaining of behavior on the two levers was strong, and timing on the DRL lever was more accurate than under ordinary DRL conditions. As the DRL requirement was lengthened from 16 sec to 24 sec to 60 sec, mediating behavior weakened slightly. When the inter-response requirement for food reinforcement on the DRL lever was made shorter than the inter-response requirement for conditioned reinforcement on the mediating lever, the mediating behavior extinguished. Performance in the experiment was analyzed into a four-component chain, and the factors contributing to the maintenance, and later extinction, of mediating behavior are discussed.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1963 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1963.6-39