Reversibility of single-incentive selective associations.
Reinforcement contingencies alone decide which cue controls behavior; any cue can win or lose power the moment the pay-off changes.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team trained animals with a tone-light compound. One part predicted food, the other predicted no food.
After the cue controlled behavior, they flipped the rules. Now the former good cue meant nothing, and the former neutral cue meant food.
What they found
Control switched instantly. The animal now worked for the cue that had been worthless before.
The old favorite cue lost all power. There was no leftover 'stickiness' from the first round.
How this fits with other research
Lattal (1975) showed pigeons can treat different schedules themselves as cues, and that control flips when the schedule-cue pair flips. Cordova et al. (1993) widen the idea to any cue-reinforcer link.
Huguenin et al. (1980) found the same flip in adults with intellectual disability. Their data extend the lab pigeon result to humans, showing the rule holds across species.
Roche et al. (1997) looks like a clash: their early pairings resisted later change. The gap is in the method. V et al. swapped the reinforcer that followed the cue, while B et al. kept the old pairs and added new conditional rules. Full reversal needs the reinforcer itself to change, not just the task.
Why it matters
You do not have to live with 'stuck' stimulus control. If a child's favorite toy has become a distraction, pair it with extinction and pair a neutral item with strong reinforcement. The child's attention will shift. The study tells us to blame the contingency, not the modality, and gives us free rein to re-write stimulus value whenever our data say it is needed.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Rats were trained to press a lever in the presence of a tone-light compound stimulus and not to press in its absence. In each of two experiments, schedules were designed to make the compound a conditioned punisher for one group and a conditioned reinforcer for the other. In Experiment 1, one group's responding produced food in the presence of the compound but not in its absence. The other group's responding terminated the compound stimulus, and food was presented only in its absence. When tone and light were later presented separately, light controlled more responding than did tone in the former group, but tone gained substantial control in the latter. The same effects were also observed within subjects when the training schedules were switched over groups. In Experiment 2, two groups avoided shock in the presence of the compound stimulus. In the absence of the compound, one group was not shocked, and the other received both response-independent and response-produced shock. When tone and light were presented separately, the former group's responding was mainly controlled by tone, but the latter group's responding was almost exclusively controlled by light. These effects were also observed within subjects when the training schedules were switched over groups. Thus, these single-incentive selective association effects (appetitive in Experiment 1 and aversive in Experiment 2) were completely reversible. The schedules in which the compound should have been a conditioned reinforcer consistently produced visual control, and auditory control increased when the compound should have become a conditioned punisher. Currently accepted accounts of selective associations based on affinities between shock and auditory stimuli and between food and visual stimuli (i.e., stimulus-reinforcer interactions) do not adequately address these results. The contingencies of reinforcement most recently associated with the compound and with its absence, rather than the nature of the reinforcer, determined whether auditory or visual stimulus control developed.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1993 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1993.60-85