The repeated acquisition of behavioral chains.
A one-second timeout kills wrong moves during chaining, but helpful cues can hide the fact that nothing was truly learned.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers taught pigeons a four-step lever chain. Each session the birds had to learn a new order of presses.
After every wrong move the bird got a brief timeout. Timeouts ranged from one second to four minutes.
What they found
Even a one-second timeout cut superstitious errors. Longer timeouts worked the same, so short ones are enough.
When a light told the next correct lever, the birds looked perfect at first. They never really learned the chain, though. The cue just guided them move-by-move.
How this fits with other research
NEVIN et al. (1963) also built chains, but used escape from loud white noise instead of timeout. Both studies show you can link responses with mild aversives, not just food.
Wilkins et al. (2009) kept the chaining logic but taught children with autism to retell stories. Their step-by-step prompts match the 1968 light cue. They saw the same risk: kids could repeat the story without understanding it.
Zigler et al. (1989) chained conversation skills in adults with schizophrenia. They added discrete trials and needed seventy-plus trials per link. The pigeon lab shows why: without timeouts or cues, errors pile up and slow the whole chain.
Why it matters
Use tiny timeouts when you shape a new chain. One second is plenty and keeps momentum. Drop any extra cues as soon as you can. If the learner still needs the cue, they have not learned the chain; they are just following the light. Probe without the cue early so you know real learning happened.
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Join Free →After each chain error, give a one-second break from materials; then restart the trial and watch if the learner needs your cue on the next try.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Monkeys were trained with food reinforcement in a chamber containing four groups of three levers. For each session the monkey's task was to learn a new four-response chain by pressing the correct lever in each group. A stable pattern of learning resulted, and the number of errors reached a steady state from session to session. The technique was then used to determine how various durations of timeouts, following errors, affected the acquisition of new chains. With no timeout, the monkeys made a great many errors, due in large part to superstitious responses within the reinforced chain. Timeout durations ranging from 1 sec to 4 min reduced the number of errors substantially. A second experiment investigated the effects upon acquisition errors of presenting a single light (an "instruction" stimulus) over the correct lever. When this light did not influence the monkeys' responses to the three alternatives, the chains were learned as without it. When the light did control responding, the monkey pressed the appropriate sequence of levers but did not learn the sequence. Thus, when the light was removed, the monkey performed as if learning that sequence for the first time.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1968 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1968.11-651