SOME NOTES ON CONDITIONED SUPPRESSION AND REINFORCEMENT SCHEDULES.
The spot where fear strikes inside a long response chain decides if work stops or finishes.
01Research in Context
What this study did
LYOSLOANE (1964) worked with pigeons that pecked a key 150 times for food.
The team then added a scary sound-light cue that signaled a mild shock.
They placed this cue at different spots inside the 150-peck run.
What they found
Birds stopped pecking right away if the cue came early in the count.
If the cue showed up near peck 140, they kept going until food dropped.
Timing, not just the scary cue, decided whether work froze or finished.
How this fits with other research
Evans (1963) showed that thicker reward schedules shield birds from fear.
The 1964 paper keeps the same FR idea but zooms in on where fear hits.
Garcia et al. (1973) later copied the setup with rats counting lever presses.
They saw the same break in the chain, proving the rule crosses species.
MIGLEMOORHEARSKELLEHER et al. (1964) ran a twin study the same year using fixed-interval timing.
They found fear slowed rate yet left the clock-like pattern untouched.
Together the pair split rate and timing, showing fear can bite in two ways.
Why it matters
Check where in the task your learner meets the hard or scary part.
Move the tough demand later in the response chain to keep momentum.
If escape pops up early, pause and reset instead of pushing through.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Two pigeons were trained on an FR 150 schedule of reinforcement. An Estes-Skinner conditioned suppression procedure was then superimposed on this performance at varied intervals. If the CS occurred during the early stages of the ratio run, complete suppression resulted. If the CS occurred during the later stages of the run, the birds continued to respond until the reinforcement was obtained, which was then followed by complete suppression.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1964 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1964.7-289