TIMING BEHAVIOR AND CONDITIONED FEAR.

The team paired a tone with mild electric shocks. This created conditioned fear.

Animals then worked on a timing task. They had to press at steady 30-second beats.

The researchers counted how fear changed both rate and timing of the presses.

Fear cut the number of presses almost in half.

Yet the presses still landed at the same 30-second marks.

Rate dropped; timing stayed perfect. The two can split apart.

Evans (1963) showed dense VI-1 schedules guard against suppression. Together the papers say: if you must use aversive events, pack reinforcers close to protect rate, but know timing may still hold.

LYOSLOANE (1964) found pigeons quit early in an FR 150 if the fear cue came at the start. That looks like a clash—here timing survived. The gap is the task: steady timing vs long ratio run. Timing stays; long hard runs break.

Garcia et al. (1973) later showed fear also wrecks counting chains. Their result widens this paper: fear can spare simple timing yet still topple more complex response sequences.

You now know rate and timing are separate gears. If a client’s avoidance drops after a scary event, check whether the lost responses are gone for good or just running on their old clock. Try reinforcing the first timely response to rebuild the rest of the chain.