Testing for inhibitory stimulus control with S- superimposed on S+

Pigeons learned a successive discrimination between a positive stimulus (red) correlated with a variable-interval 1-min reinforcement schedule and a negative stimulus (vertical line) correlated with either a variable-interval 5-min schedule or extinction. Transfer tests measured the rate of responding to the positive stimulus alone, to various orientations of the negative stimulus, and to the same line orientations superimposed on the positive stimulus. Although there were no gradients with minima at the training value for the negative stimulus dimension, the addition of the negative stimulus dimension to the positive stimulus always resulted in a lower response rate than that for the positive stimulus alone. The results demonstrate that an operational definition of inhibitory stimulus control that requires increased responding to stimuli more distant from a negative stimulus (along some dimension) is not always consistent with a definition that requires the suppression of responding in the presence of one stimulus, the positive stimulus, by the simultaneous presentation of another, the negative stimulus.