Response allocation to concurrent fixed-ratio reinforcement schedules with work requirements by adults with mental retardation and typical preschool children.

Adults with intellectual disability and typical preschool kids chose between two simple jobs. Each job had its own fixed-ratio schedule and its own reinforcer.

The researchers kept the schedules equal at first. Later they made one schedule harder but also made its reinforcer bigger. They watched who picked which job.

When both jobs paid the same, everyone picked the easier one. When the harder job paid more, most people switched and worked harder.

Reinforcer size beat response effort. Value on the schedule, not sweat, guided choice.

Smith et al. (1997) ran a near-copy of this setup one year earlier. They also saw that bigger ratio requirements pushed people toward one reinforcer. The target paper swaps "stimulus similarity" for "work requirement" and gets the same pattern.

Diaz de Villegas et al. (2024) tops this finding with preschoolers. They pitted synchronous against accumulated reinforcement and got bigger, clearer gains plus child preference data. Their 2024 paper gives you a stronger, ready-to-use choice.

Leung et al. (2014) stretched the idea further. They showed that if you keep the work heavy but drop the reinforcer size by 40%, kids bail out. Heavy work is fine only if the payoff stays fat.

You can get clients to work harder without shaping new skills. Just tie the tough task to a richer payoff. Before you assign hard work, check the reinforcer size under that schedule. If the payoff feels small to the client, boost it or break the work into smaller chunks. This one lever—schedule value—often beats trying to reduce effort.