Repeated acquisition of conditional discriminations.
A brief change of scenery during timeout teaches faster than simply making the pause longer.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team ran discrete trials with pigeons. The birds had to peck the correct key when colors and positions changed.
Wrong pecks gave a short timeout. The researchers changed what the bird saw during that blackout. They also stretched practice across many short sessions.
What they found
Changing the timeout scene helped the birds learn faster than simply waiting. Extra daily sessions cut the total mistakes.
Color cues guided choices more than where the key sat. The stimulus switch during timeout mattered more than its length.
How this fits with other research
Macphail (1968) saw the opposite: timeout wrecked stimulus control. The difference is timing. M gave timeout after the bird finished a long ratio; the new study gave it right after each wrong peck. Quick, trial-by-trial blackouts can help, but long ones can erase stimulus control.
O’Neill et al. (2018) later replaced timeout with a five-second prompt delay for children with autism. Both papers chase fewer errors in conditional discrimination. The lab result with birds foreshadows the prompt-delay fix you now use with kids.
Grindle et al. (2002) added audiovisual cues during delayed reinforcers for autistic learners. Like the pigeon study, they show that what happens in the gap between response and reward decides how fast learning moves.
Why it matters
When you run error-correction trials, pay attention to what the learner sees right after a mistake. A quick scene change, like dimming lights or switching the screen color, can do more good than extending the timeout clock. Keep sessions short and frequent to trim total errors.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
A new technique was developed to study the repeated acquisition of conditional discriminations. Using a discrete trial procedure, pigeons were required to learn during each session a different two-member chain of conditional discriminations. Key color and geometric forms were used as stimuli. After the pigeons had reached a steady state of relearning (40 to 60 sessions), the technique was used to investigate variables that have previously been shown to affect the repeated acquisition of response sequences. Various (0 to 90 seconds) durations of timeout for errors were investigated in Experiment I. The stimulus change associated with a timeout, rather than its duration, was found to be the critical variable in acquisition of the discrimination. Extended training on a single chain was found to reduce total errors across sessions in Experiment II. Extended training (three sessions) did not, however, change the pattern of within-session error reduction. In some cases, extended training facilitated acquisition of a partially reversed discrimination. In Experiment III, color rather than chain position was found to control behavior, for three of the four birds, as the second stimulus dimension in the conditional situation. The results of these experiments replicate and extend previous findings concerning some of the variables that affect the repeated acquisition of response sequences.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1978 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1978.29-225