Concurrent schedules: discriminating reinforcer-ratio reversals at a fixed time after the previous reinforcer

Six pigeons worked on concurrent exponential variable-interval schedules in which the relative frequency of food deliveries for responding on the two alternatives reversed at a fixed time after each food delivery. Across conditions, the point of food-ratio reversal was varied from 10 s to 30 s, and the overall reinforcer rate was varied from 1.33 to 4 per minute. The effect of rate of food delivery and food-ratio-reversal time on choice and response rates was small. In all conditions, postfood choice was toward the locally richer key, regardless of the last-food location. Unlike the local food ratio which changed in a stepwise fashion, local choice changed according to a decelerating monotonic function, becoming substantially less extreme than the local food ratio soon after food delivery. This deviation in choice appeared to result from the birds' inaccurate discrimination of the time of food deliveries; local choice was described well by a model that assumed that log response ratios matched food ratios that were redistributed across surrounding time bins with mean time t and a constant coefficient of variation. We suggest that local choice is controlled by the likely availability of food in time, and that choice matches the discriminated log of the ratio of food rates across time since the last food delivery.