Simultaneous auditory discrimination.
Rats master simultaneous auditory choices in under 700 trials, giving BCBAs a ready protocol for auditory-only discrimination with any learner.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Rats worked in a two-lever box.
Two sounds played at the same time.
Press right for one sound, left for the other.
The study asked: how fast do rats learn this go-right/go-left rule?
What they found
Every rat learned the task.
They needed 400-700 tries.
No rat favored one side.
The setup works for pure-auditory matching.
How this fits with other research
AZRIN et al. (1963) moved the same idea to blind, severely disabled children.
The kids also built clean auditory generalization gradients, proving the method crosses species and disability status.
Goldman et al. (1979) used the same lab and rats but measured how long each press took.
Latency gave steadier data than yes-no accuracy, so if you copy this task, time the responses.
RISLEY (1964) ran a two-response auditory test with people and got a bimodal latency curve.
The rat data stay smooth, showing the gradient shape can change with species even when the procedure looks identical.
Why it matters
You now have a road map for teaching auditory-only choices.
Use two response ports, keep trials short, and track latency for cleaner data.
The method works with vision-impaired learners and needs no extra visuals.
Try it next time you build listening skills or want to rule out visual prompts.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Stimuli in many visual stimulus control studies typically are presented simultaneously; in contrast the stimuli in auditory discrimination studies are presented successively. Many everyday auditory stimuli that control responding occur simultaneously. This suggests that simultaneous auditory discriminations should be readily acquired. The purpose of the present experiment was to train rats in a simultaneous auditory discrimination. The apparatus consisted of a cage with two response levers mounted on one wall and a speaker mounted adjacent to each lever. A feeder was mounted on the opposite wall. In a go-right/go-left procedure, two stimuli were presented on each trial, a wide-band noise burst through one speaker and a 2-kHz complex signal through the other. The stimuli alternated randomly from side to side across trials, and the stimulus correlated with reinforcement for presses varied across subjects. The rats acquired the discrimination in 400 to 700 trials, and no response position preference developed during acquisition. The ease with which the simultaneous discrimination was acquired suggests that procedures, such as matching to sample, that require simultaneous presentation of stimuli can be used with auditory stimuli in animals having poor vision.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1990 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1990.54-45