Verbal behavior and initial exposure to delayed reinforcement.
Adults can learn under 10–20 s delayed reinforcement, but most do not and cannot say why.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers asked adults to press keys in a quiet lab.
If they hit the secret pattern, money arrived 10 or 20 seconds later.
No light or sound told them the delay was ending.
The team watched who learned and who did not.
What they found
Only a few adults figured the game out.
Most kept pressing the wrong keys and earned little.
Even the winners could not explain why they won.
Learning can hide under long, silent delays.
How this fits with other research
Koegel et al. (1992) saw babies coo more when parents smiled just three seconds late.
Tiny delays help infants, but 10-20 s blocks most adults.
Eisenmajer et al. (1998) showed pigeons quit when food was three seconds late and unsignaled.
Birds and people both struggle, yet people still edge ahead under longer waits.
Leon et al. (2016) added that real food keeps adults pressing longer than token points when pay is late.
If you must wait, pick strong, primary reinforcers.
Why it matters
Your client may not feel the reinforcer that comes after a bathroom break or walk to the prize box.
Keep rewards instant or mark the wait with a timer, song, or token flip.
When delays are unavoidable, use bites, sips, or other sure-fire items and watch responding closely.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Ten subjects responded under a tandem fixed-ratio 1 not-responding-greater-than-t schedule of point delivery during one 75-min session in which the delay was either 10 or 20 s. Subjects were asked to describe the contingencies throughout the session. Although studies with non-humans have demonstrated response acquisition under similar delayed-consequence procedures, a minority of subjects in the current study demonstrated sensitivity to delayed consequences convincingly. All subjects exhibited inefficient patterns of responding and descriptions of nonexistent contingencies. Subjects who demonstrated learning were more likely to verbalize the actual contingencies, but this was not true in all cases. Furthermore, some subjects who demonstrated learning did not describe the delay contingency. Results suggest that learning may occur in the absence of a person's ability to describe environment-behavior relations.
The Analysis of verbal behavior, 2000 · doi:10.1007/BF03392960