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

Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior

|July 1, 1970

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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.

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.

Related Experiment Videos

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.