The several roles of stimuli in token reinforcement.
Tokens wear three hats at once—reinforcer, cue, and backup reinforcer—so watch which hat is helping or hurting your learner.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers worked with pigeons in a lab. They set up token schedules where birds earned plastic chips for pecking a key.
The team compared three set-ups: regular tandem schedules, token schedules, and response-independent token drops. They tracked how fast the birds pecked in each condition.
What they found
Tokens changed behavior in three ways at once. First, birds pecked slower when tokens were part of the deal. Second, tokens acted like stopwatches, signaling when food would arrive. Third, birds kept pecking even when tokens dropped for free, showing the chips themselves had value.
The same little plastic chip worked as a reinforcer, a time-teller, and a free goodie all at once.
How this fits with other research
This builds on Tager-Flusberg (1981) and Ramer et al. (1977), who showed brief signals can control pecking. E et al. add that tokens are not just signals—they also pay off like food.
Paul (1983) found ratio requirements can act like cues. E et al. extend this by showing tokens can serve as cues too, while also paying for behavior.
Ainslie et al. (2003) bundled food pellets to help rats wait longer. E et al. show tokens can serve a similar bridging function, but they also warn that tokens may slow responding if not arranged carefully.
Why it matters
Your token board is doing more than you think. Those stars or poker chips are telling the learner when the big reward is coming, acting like mini-rewards themselves, and maybe even slowing work if the schedule is too lean. Check which job each token is doing in your program.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Three experiments were conducted with pigeons to identify the stimulus functions of tokens in second-order token-reinforcement schedules. All experiments employed two-component multiple schedules with a token-reinforcement schedule in one component and a schedule with equivalent response requirements and/or reinforcer density in the other. In Experiment 1, response rates were lower under a token-reinforcement schedule than under a tandem schedule with the same response requirements, suggesting a discriminative role for the tokens. In Experiment 2, response rates varied systematically with signaling functions of the tokens in a series of conditions designed to explore other aspects of the temporal-correlative relations between tokens and food. In Experiment 3, response rates were reduced but not eliminated by presenting tokens independent of responding, yoked to their temporal occurrence in a preceding token component, suggesting both a reinforcing function and eliciting/evocative functions based on stimulus-food relations. Only when tokens were removed entirely was responding eliminated. On the whole, the results suggest that tokens, as stimuli temporally correlated with food, may serve multiple stimulus functions in token-reinforcement procedures--reinforcing, discriminative, or eliciting--depending on the precise arrangement of the contingencies in which they are embedded.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 2015 · doi:10.1002/jeab.117