Time horizons in rats: the effect of operant control of access to future food.
Making learners work or respond during a delay stretches how far into the future that delayed payoff can control current behavior.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Buskist et al. (1988) asked a simple question: can rats learn to work now for food they will get later?
The team set up a lever. Each press added one second to a timer. When the timer reached a target, the rat earned a future meal.
They then watched how long the rats would wait before eating the current food, knowing more work stretched the wait for the next meal.
What they found
Rats that had to work for future food waited longer before eating the snack in front of them.
The work requirement stretched their 'time horizon'—the future meal now mattered more than the food under their nose.
Some rats stretched farther than others, showing individual differences in self-control.
How this fits with other research
Drifke et al. (2020) and Iannaccone et al. (2021) took the same idea to children. They showed that making kids do an appropriate response (DRA) while they wait for reinforcement keeps problem behavior low and stretches tolerance to delay better than simply telling them to wait (DRO).
Boudreau et al. (2015) moved the work from lever presses to visual cues. Mice learned faster when colored lights told them how long the wait would be, proving that signals can also lengthen the time horizon.
Together these studies build a bridge: whether you are a rat, a mouse, or a child, adding an operant requirement—work or a signaled response—makes future rewards more real right now.
Why it matters
If you want a client to accept longer waits for reinforcement, give them something to do during the delay. Ask for a mand, a matching task, or a simple chore. The response itself becomes part of the reinforcer package and stretches patience the same way lever presses did for the rats. Start with short delays, require the response every time, and thin the schedule only after the client shows calm, cooperative waiting.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Add a quick, easy response requirement—like a one-card match—before each delayed reinforcer and watch problem behavior during waits drop.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
The primary goal of this experiment was to determine whether the addition of an operant requirement for access to a less costly (continuous reinforcement) patch of future food increased the time horizon over which that future patch decreased intake in a currently available depleting (progressive-ratio) patch. Three groups of 4 rats were tested. Each member of the earned-time group was required to cumulate a fixed-time outside the progressive-ratio patch to obtain access to food in the less costly patch; the fixed-time requirement ranged from 2 to 64 min. Rats in the matched-time group received response-independent access to less costly food at the average delay shown by the earned-time group. Rats in the matched-time no-food group were removed from the chamber at the same average delay without receiving access to less costly food. Two of the earned-time rats showed an increased time horizon relative to that shown by the matched-time rats (approaching 40 min for 1 rat). The other 2 earned-time rats markedly increased instrumental responding but showed suppression of intake only when food was less than 20 min away. The matched-time group showed less suppression of intake over a similar range of delay intervals. Surprisingly, the matched-time no-food animals also showed suppression of intake concentrated at the end of the session, possibly reflecting the receipt of their entire daily ration 30 min after the session. The potential importance of time horizons to the foraging process is clear, but experimenters are still working out paradigms for investigation of these horizons.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1988 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1988.50-405