The matching law in and within groups of rats.
The matching law works for single rats and for the cage average, but the same math flops with humans.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team put rats in a box with two levers. Each lever paid off on its own variable-interval schedule.
They recorded every press, then asked: do the animals match the payoff ratios? They also checked if the group average matched as well as each single rat.
What they found
Both the group curve and every individual rat lined up with the matching law.
The law worked inside one animal and when scores were lumped together.
How this fits with other research
Thomas (1974) found the opposite in humans. People missed the matching prediction by 15-20%. The clash is simple: rats match, people don’t.
Vyse (1986) later showed wild wagtails do match while defending feeding spots, stretching the rule from lab to field.
Lattal (1974) also stretched it sideways, proving the same equation holds when reinforcement is escaping shock instead of earning food.
Why it matters
If you graph client behavior across two schedules, start with the animal data as your baseline. Watch for human-style drift; plan extra prompts or self-monitoring when people over- or under-match. Use the group average only after you confirm each learner already fits the line.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
In each of the two experiments, a group of five rats lived in a complex maze containing four small single-lever operant chambers. In two of these chambers, food was available on variable-interval schedules of reinforcement. In Experiment I, nine combinations of variable intervals were used, and the aggregate lever-pressing rates (by the five rats together) were studied. The log ratio of the rates in the two chambers was linearly related to the log ratio of the reinforcement rates in them; this is an instance of Herrnstein's matching law, as generalized by Baum. Summing over the two food chambers, food consumption decreased, and response output increased, as the time required to earn each pellet increased. In Experiment II, the behavior of individual rats was observed by time-sampling on selected days, while different variable-interval schedules were arranged in the two chambers where food was available. Individual lever-pressing rates for the rats were obtained, and their median bore the same "matching" relationship to the reinforcement rates as the group aggregate in Experiment I. There were differences between the rats in their distribution of time and responses between the two food chambers; these differences were correlated with differences in the proportions of reinforcements the rats obtained from each chamber.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1977 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1977.27-183