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Two-key concurrent responding: response-reinforcement dependencies and blackouts.

E W Herbert

    Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior
    |July 1, 1970
    PubMed
    Summary

    Pigeons matched their responding to key blackout durations, demonstrating a form of the matching law. This behavior held even when reinforcement depended on responses following blackouts.

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    Area of Science:

    • Behavioral psychology
    • Animal behavior studies
    • Operant conditioning principles

    Background:

    • The matching law describes how response rates correspond to reinforcement rates.
    • Previous research explored concurrent schedules and response-reinforcer dependencies.

    Purpose of the Study:

    • To investigate how pigeons allocate responding under concurrent schedules with blackout intervals.
    • To test the matching law and alternative functional forms under varied reinforcement conditions.

    Main Methods:

    • Three experiments used two-key concurrent schedules with variable-interval reinforcement for pigeons.
    • Blackout durations and reinforcement dependencies were manipulated across experiments.
    • Response frequencies were recorded and analyzed in relation to interval durations and reinforcement schedules.

    Main Results:

    • Pigeons matched response frequency to the reciprocal of blackout duration in Experiment I.
    • Matching was observed in one pigeon in Experiment II, where reinforcement followed a response after a blackout.
    • Responding on a delay key in Experiment III better fit a negative exponential function than the matching function.

    Conclusions:

    • Pigeon behavior approximated the matching law under specific concurrent schedule conditions.
    • Reinforcement dependency (automatic vs. response-dependent) influences response allocation.
    • Findings suggest limitations of the standard matching law and support alternative functional forms in certain scenarios.

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