The "where is it?" reflex: autoshaping the orienting response.
Conditioned stimuli do more than signal reinforcement—they automatically steer where the learner looks and moves.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Murphy (1982) looked at decades of animal lab work.
He asked: are conditioned orienting and autoshaping two things or one?
He argued they are the same reflex, driven by how relevant the stimulus is, not how new it is.
What they found
The review shows that any stimulus tied to food or shock will make an animal look, lean, or move toward it.
This happens even if the stimulus is old and familiar.
Relevance, not novelty, drives the "where is it?" reflex.
How this fits with other research
Michael (1974) had already shown that pigeons will peck a key just because it signals food.
Murphy (1982) says that peck is the same as the orienting reflex—just a bigger version.
Byrd (1980) found monkeys’ heart rates jump more when a shock signal also stops them from working.
Murphy (1982) ties this in: the same conditioned stimulus can steer both tiny eye movements and big bodily changes.
Together, these papers show one process: stimuli gain control over any response that helps the animal get or avoid what matters.
Why it matters
When you place a picture card on the table, the child’s eyes, head, and hands all shift.
That whole package is one conditioned response.
Plan for it: set the card where you want the gaze to land, because the stimulus itself will pull attention there.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Place the S+ card in the exact spot where you want the child’s eyes to go—let the stimulus do the first part of the work for you.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
The goal of this review is to compare two divergent lines of research on signal-centered behavior: the orienting reflex (OR) and autoshaping. A review of conditioning experiments in animals and humans suggests that the novelty hypothesis of the OR is no longer tenable. Only stimuli that represent biological "relevance" elicit ORs. A stimulus may be relevant a priori (i.e., unconditioned) or as a result of conditioning. Exposure to a conditioned stimulus (CS) that predicts a positive reinforcer causes the animal to orient to it throughout conditioning. Within the CS-US interval, the initial CS-directed orienting response is followed by US-directed tendencies. Experimental evidence is shown that the development and maintenance of the conditioned OR occur in a similar fashion both in response-independent (classical) and response-dependent (instrumental) paradigms. It is proposed that the conditioned OR and the signal-directed autoshaped response are identical. Signals predicting aversive events repel the subject from the source of the CS. It is suggested that the function of the CS is not only to signal the probability of US occurrence, but also to serve as a spatial cue to guide the animal in the environment.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1982 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1982.37-461