Responding on concurrent-chains schedules in open and closed economies.
Choice is glued to the fastest signaled path to reinforcement, not to how much reinforcement is available overall.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Landry et al. (1989) watched pigeons choose between two keys in a two-part chain.
First peck produced entry to a side key. Second peck on that side delivered food after a set delay.
The team ran the same birds in two money rules. Open economy: extra food at the end of the day. Closed economy: all food had to come from the session.
They asked, does overall food rate or the faster-to-reinforcer key drive choice?
What they found
Birds always picked the key that cut the wait to food most, no matter which economy.
In the closed setup only, birds also worked more total pecks when daily food got tight.
So choice follows relative delay reduction, not the wider food budget.
How this fits with other research
Stockhorst (1994) later gave college students the same kind of wait-time choice. People, like pigeons, took the lean schedule when its wait shrank.
Winett et al. (1991) showed the delay rule even sets the value of conditioned reinforcers. Together the three papers build one clean rule: faster arrival equals stronger pull.
Eisenmajer et al. (1998) seems to clash. They added a surprise 3-s delay and saw choice crash. The gap closes when you see they removed the signal that marks shorter delay. Without that cue the rule still holds—birds could no longer spot the quicker path.
Why it matters
Your client’s world is a chain of hoops before the prize. Break big delays into short, signaled steps. Keep the last step close in time and mark it with a clear cue. That pairing, not the overall rate of rewards, locks in the choice you want.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Pigeons' key pecks were reinforced according to concurrent-chains schedules of reinforcement. The programmed average time from the onset of the initial links to a terminal link entry was held constant across conditions while the value of variable-interval schedules in the terminal links was varied. Performance was assessed under two economic conditions: (a) an open economy in which session duration was limited to 1 hr and subjects were maintained at 80% of their free-feeding body weights with postsession food when necessary; and (b) a closed economy in which sessions were 23.5 hr long and no deprivation regimen was in effect. In all cases, the relative rate of responding in the initial links matched the reduction in overall delay to primary reinforcement correlated with entry into one terminal link relative to the reduction in delay correlated with entry into the other terminal link. Although the sum of responses made in the initial links and terminal links was found to increase, then decrease, as the rate of food presentation decreased in the closed economy, there was no consistent effect of overall rate of food presentation on total responding in the open economy. The choice data suggest that relative delay reduction predicts choice accurately, regardless of economic context.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1989 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1989.51-329