The control of responding by sounds: unusual effect of reinforcement.

Researchers put rats in a box with two levers. A speaker on one side played a tone. The rats earned food by pressing the lever under the speaker.

Next, the team flipped the rule. Now the rats had to press the opposite lever to get food. The sound stayed on the same side.

When the rewarded lever sat under the speaker, rats learned fast. They pressed the right lever almost every time.

When the reward moved to the far lever, the rats still favored the lever next to the sound. Spatial closeness beat the new payoff rule.

Thompson et al. (1971) saw the same speed advantage eight years earlier. Their rats also learned faster when the reinforced lever hugged the speaker. White (1979) goes further by showing the pull of spatial contiguity can override the printed contingency.

Renne et al. (1976) worked with lights plus tones. They found auditory cues ruled under avoidance, while visual cues ruled under food reward. The 1979 paper keeps the auditory focus but swaps in spatial distance as the deciding factor.

Castelloe et al. (1993) tweaked timeout length in a prey-detection task. Small timeout changes barely moved bias. The 1979 study shows a bigger bias driver: mere inches between sound and lever.

When you set up conditional discrimination, put the S+ close to the client’s usual response spot. If the tablet sits on the left, teach left-touch for the target sound. Moving the S+ across the table may slow learning even if the payoff stays the same. Keep stimuli near the likely response location to harness spatial contiguity and speed acquisition.