The delay-reduction hypothesis of conditioned reinforcement and punishment: Observing behavior.
Signals work best when they mean the wait is almost over.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Pigeons pecked a key to see colored lights. The lights told them how long they had to wait for food.
Sometimes the wait was short. Sometimes it was long. The researchers counted how often the birds peeked at the lights.
What they found
Birds looked more when the light meant a short wait. They almost stopped looking when it meant a long wait.
Even without food, just seeing the light kept the pecking going. The wait time, not the light itself, drove the behavior.
How this fits with other research
García-Leal et al. (2019) and Fortes et al. (2015) later showed that making birds peck more during the wait can either lower or raise the value of the delayed food. These studies extend the 1981 idea that what happens during the gap matters.
Rutherford et al. (2003) used token lights in a self-control task. Like the 1981 study, they found that stimulus lights gain or lose power based on how close they bring the animal to food.
All together, the papers say the same thing: stimuli are only as good as the delay they predict.
Why it matters
When you use pictures, tokens, or praise, tie them to short waits or quick pay-offs. If a child must wait, break the wait into steps and give a signal for each step. Drop the signal if the wait gets too long; it will lose its punch and may even suppress behavior.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Pigeons responded in an observing-response procedure in which three fixed-interval components alternated. Pecking one response key produced food reinforcement according to a mixed schedule. Pecking the second (observing) key occasionally replaced the mixed-schedule stimulus with the stimulus correlated with the fixed-interval component then in effect. In Experiment 1, observing was best maintained by stimuli correlated with a reduction in mean time to reinforcement. That finding was consistent with the conditioned-reinforcement hypothesis of observing behavior. However, low rates of observing were also maintained by stimuli not representing delay reduction. Experiment 2 assessed the role of sensory reinforcement. It showed that response rate was higher when maintained by stimuli uncorrelated with reinforcement delay than when the stimuli were correlated with a delay increase. This latter result supports a symmetrical version of the conditioned-reinforcement hypothesis that requires suppression by stimuli correlated with an increase in time to reinforcement. The results were inconsistent with hypotheses stressing the reinforcing potency of uncertainty reduction.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1981 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1981.35-93