Signal-controlled responding.
Stimulus-food pairings can lock in responding even when the response now cancels the food.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers placed three pigeons in a small chamber with a round key.
A 5-second tone played every few minutes.
If the bird pecked during the tone, grain arrived.
Later the rules changed: pecks brought nothing, or pecks stopped the grain.
The team watched how the tone alone kept the birds pecking.
What they found
The tone kept the birds pecking even when pecks canceled food.
Rates stayed high during extinction and during omission trials.
The sound-food link, not the food itself, drove the behavior.
How this fits with other research
Brown et al. (1968) first showed that light-food pairings alone make pigeons peck.
Hartmann et al. (1979) extends that work by proving the pecking survives when it hurts the bird.
Shimp et al. (1974) also kept pigeons pecking, but with shock removal instead of food.
Together the three papers show key-pecking can be held up by very different forces.
Why it matters
Your client may keep engaging even when the reward is gone or worse.
Check if the cue itself is paired with good things.
Weaken the cue-reward link before you try extinction.
Add salient new cues that signal true zero reinforcement.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Pigeons' key pecks were reinforced with grain, then extinguished. An 8-second tone preceded the availability of peck-dependent grain 1 second after tone offset. When a tone signalled grain and an 8-second clicking sound did not, three pigeons pecked during a high percentage of tone periods, but they pecked during a low percentage of click periods. When the roles of the tone and clicking sound were reversed, performance reversed. For other birds, when a key peck during the tone cancelled the availability of grain (omission procedure), the tendency to key peck during the tone decreased some, but still remained high. A third group of pigeons received the omission procedure with the addition that the tone could not end unless 2 seconds had elapsed without a key peck. The pigeons continued to respond in a high percentage of tone periods. The experiments favor an explanation based on the pairing of the tone with a reinforced response, such as Pavlovian conditioning.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1979 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1979.31-115