Schedule-induced licking during multiple schedules.
Licking rate is a live gauge of how rich the current reinforcement schedule feels.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Dardano (1972) watched how fast rats licked water while living under two reinforcement schedules.
The cage gave food on two different timetables in the same session. The team counted licks and timed how long each drinking burst lasted.
What they found
Lick speed followed the same ratio as the food rate. More food per minute meant more licks per minute.
After each pellet, the rat drank longer when the next pellet was far away. Short wait, short drink. Long wait, long drink.
How this fits with other research
Bell (1999) saw the same matching idea with lever pressing, not licking. Both studies show behavior lines up with payoff rate.
Kimball et al. (2023) looked at renewal under lean and rich interval schedules. They found relapse no matter the rate. That seems opposite, but they measured return of old responses, not side behavior like licking. Different question, different answer.
Ghaziuddin et al. (1996) used matching math to show hens avoid noise. F used matching math to show rats drink more when food is scarce. Same ruler, new wall.
Why it matters
You now have a cheap, built-in meter for reinforcement rate: watch adjunctive licking. If a client starts drinking faster during work breaks, your schedule may have gotten leaner than you planned. Use the drink meter to fine-tune timing and keep engagement steady.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Schedule-induced polydipsia was studied in rats bar pressing under two-component multiple schedules of food reinforcement. The first component of the multiple schedule was a variable-interval 1-min schedule throughout the experiment. The schedule comprising the second component was varied over blocks of sessions in terms of rate and magnitude of reinforcement, and was either variable-interval 3-min (one pellet), variable-interval 3-min (three pellets), variable-interval 1-min (one pellet), or extinction. Water intake per session varied with the rate of reinforcement in the schedule comprising the second component and was highest when the schedule was variable-interval 1-min. Both bar-pressing behavior and licking behavior showed behavioral interactions between the two components of the multiple schedules. With magnitude of reinforcement held constant, a matching relationship was observed between lick rate and reinforcement rate; the relative frequency of licks in the constant component matched the relative frequency of reinforcement in that component. Bar pressing, however, showed only a moderate degree of relativity matching. During the schedule-induced licking, a burst of licking followed each delivery of a pellet (post-prandial drinking). The duration of these bursts of licking was observed to be a function of the inter-reinforcement interval.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1972 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1972.17-413