The local organization of behavior: dissociations between a pigeon's behavior and self-reports of that behavior.
Behavior can follow a reinforcement rule while the organism remains unable to describe that rule.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team watched pigeons peck a key under a reinforcement schedule.
After each short session the bird could hit one of two keys labeled "short runs" or "long runs" to report what it had just done.
The goal was to see if the pigeons could tell the experimenter what their own pecking looked like.
What they found
The birds quickly matched their peck rate to the schedule.
Yet their "self-report" keys were often wrong; they would peck "short runs" even after a long burst.
Behavior followed the contingency, but the verbal-ish report did not.
How this fits with other research
Julià (1982) showed the same lab that pigeons can change run length when the payoff changes.
Shimp (1976) also proved pigeons remember the order of their last few pecks for several seconds.
Together these studies create an apparent contradiction: the birds have the memory and the pattern control, yet still fail to describe what they just did.
The difference is the response class: remembering order is one thing, labeling it with an arbitrary key is another.
Why it matters
For BCBAs the lesson is clear: do not trust verbal reports alone, even when the speaker seems to "know" the contingency.
Always record the actual behavior and let the data speak.
When you ask a client "How many times did you do it?" or "Was that a long or short bout?" check the numbers yourself before you make treatment changes.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The purpose of the experiment was to study the relation between what an organism does in a setting that demands temporal patterning of behavior and what it reports it has done. More specifically, a pigeon produced two classes, shorter and longer, of temporal patterns of key pecks (interresponse times) on a center key. Occasionally, a symbolic matching-to-sample probe arranged on side keys asked the pigeon whether its most recent pattern was a shorter or longer one. The longer reinforced pattern was always three times as long as the shorter one and the two patterns were reinforced equally often. Absolute duration of reinforced patterns was varied. In some conditions, interresponse-time distributions on the center key were bimodal, indicating a clear behavioral adaptation to the contingency, yet a bird did not report very well by appropriate side-key responding what its most recent interresponse time had been. In other conditions, the interresponse-time distributions were less clearly bimodal, yet a bird reported more accurately its previous interresponse time as shorter or longer. Thus, there was a dissociation between how well behavior on the center key conformed to the schedule requirement and how well a bird reported what it was doing on the center key. In addition, as absolute duration of the reinforced patterns was increased, a bird categorized its most recent pattern less well even as its preference for the shorter pattern increased dramatically. These results were interpreted as an example of the phenomenon of dissociation between tacit knowledge and knowledge.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1983 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1983.39-61