Second-order schedules with paired auditory brief stimuli.
A quick sound between ratios boosts responding more than a flash, and birds speed up because they track time, not the cue itself.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Fantino (1981) asked a simple question: do pigeons work harder when a short sound, not a light, marks progress inside a big ratio?
The birds pecked on a two-part chain. After every 30 pecks they heard a 0.5-s tone; after 10 of those tones they got food. A second group saw a flash instead of the tone. The team counted pecks in each tiny segment.
What they found
Pigeons who heard the tone pecked faster than birds who saw the flash. Response rate rose across the 10 segments, but only because the birds tracked time, not because they noticed the stimulus itself.
In plain words: sound beats light as a mid-ratio cue, and the birds were using an inner clock, not the cue, to speed up.
How this fits with other research
Catania (1973) had already shown that any brief stimulus, even a light, cuts the long pause pigeons take before big fixed ratios. Fantino (1981) adds that sound does the job better than light.
Sturmey (1994) later proved that an unpaired brief sound alone can push different response rates across tandem schedules. Together the three papers show the cue does not need extra food to matter; sound just works better.
A year later Tanguay et al. (1982) switched to color tracking and still saw high rates, confirming the broader rule: second-order schedules with salient cues keep pigeons pecking.
Why it matters
If you run token boards or chained schedules with learners who have autism, try marking each step with a brief sound instead of only a visual token. The auditory cue may keep the pace brisk, especially in long work chains. Watch for speeding up near the end; it may reflect timing, not discrimination, so adjust reinforcement if you want steady, not rushed, responding.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Pigeons were exposed to multiple second-order schedules of paired and unpaired brief stimuli in which responding on the main key was reinforced according to a fixed-interval thirty-second schedule by a brief stimulus (a tone in the paired schedule) and advancement to the next segment of the second-order schedule. In Experiment 1, a response on the second key was required during the tone in its fourth and final presentation to produce food. Responses during earlier brief stimuli indicated the extent to which the final brief stimulus was discriminated from preceding ones. Responding was comparable during all tones, extending prior findings with visual paired brief stimuli and weakening explanations of subjects' failure to discriminate between brief-stimulus presentations in terms of elicited responding. In Experiment 2 the number of fixed-interval segments comprising the second-order schedules varied from one through eight. Although main-key response rates increased across segments in both experiments, they increased much less sharply with a variable number of segments. These results suggest that the increase in main-key response rates across segments is due primarily to a degree of temporal discrimination not reflected on the second key. Main-key response rates were higher on paired auditory brief-stimulus schedules than on unpaired visual brief-stimulus schedules, especially in Experiment 2, thus further extending findings with visual brief stimuli to second-order schedules with auditory brief stimuli.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1981 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1981.36-343