Temporal tracking on cyclic-interval reinforcement schedules.
Post-reinforcement pause grows as a power function of the upcoming wait time, and signals sharpen the match.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Mahoney et al. (1971) worked with pigeons on a special feeding schedule. The schedule cycled through short and long waits between food.
A light or tone told the bird which wait was coming. The team watched how long the bird paused after each bite before pecking again.
What they found
The birds stretched or squeezed their pause to match the next wait time. Shorter cycles made the match cleaner.
Signals helped the birds track the cycle even more closely.
How this fits with other research
CUMMINBOWER et al. (1963) ran an earlier cyclic schedule with rats. They saw more responses when cycles were short, but did not test pause length. K et al. add the pause rule.
Rider et al. (1984) later showed the same pause rule on lever-hold schedules. Their rats paused longer when total time-to-food grew, even if lever-hold seconds stayed the same. This extends K’s finding beyond pure cyclic designs.
Leslie (1981) moved the idea to everyday variable-interval schedules. Long pauses still showed up after food when the local chance of more food was low. The pause is sensitive to any drop in upcoming payoff.
Why it matters
If you use interval schedules in therapy, know that clients will pause longer after reinforcement when the next payoff is far away. You can shorten pauses by keeping cycles short or adding signals that tell when the next reinforcer is close. Try a brief color change or click cue before the next wait begins.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Pigeons were exposed to four cycles per session of a schedule in which the duration of successive interreinforcement intervals differed by t-sec. A cycle was composed of seven increasing and seven decreasing intervals, from 2t to 8t sec in length. In Exp. 1, postreinforcement pause tracked interval duration on five cyclic schedules, with values of t ranging from 2 to 40 sec. Tracking was better at shorter t values, and when discriminative stimuli signalled increasing and decreasing parts of the cycle. Pooled data for the whole experiment showed postreinforcement pause to bear a power function relationship to interval length, with a smaller exponent than the comparable function for fixed-interval schedules. Tests in a second experiment showed that pigeons trained on an arithmetic progression could also track schedules in which successive intervals followed either a logarithmic or a geometric progression, although tracking was more stable in the logarithmic case.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1971 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1971.16-411