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Preference pulses without reinforcers.

Anthony P McLean1, Randolph C Grace, Raymond C Pitts

  • 1University of Canterbury, New Zealand.

Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior
|March 29, 2014
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Preference pulses in concurrent schedules are largely shaped by visit lengths, not just reinforcement effects. Researchers propose a new method to isolate local reinforcement impacts by removing visit structure artifacts.

Keywords:
concurrent scheduleslocal reinforcement effectspreference pulsesrun length distributionssimulation

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Area of Science:

  • Behavioral psychology
  • Animal behavior and cognition

Background:

  • Preference pulses are traditionally linked to short-term reinforcement effects in concurrent schedules.
  • The influence of response distributions (visit lengths) on preference pulse shape is often overlooked.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the extent to which visit structure, independent of reinforcement, shapes preference pulses.
  • To propose and validate a method for isolating local reinforcement effects from artifactual influences.

Main Methods:

  • Simulations varied parameters of response-per-visit distributions for two concurrent alternatives.
  • Reinforcers were arranged using concurrent variable-interval schedules.
  • A novel method was developed to subtract visit structure artifacts from observed preference pulses.

Main Results:

  • Simulations demonstrated that visit structure alone can generate diverse preference pulse shapes.
  • Observed preference pulses are substantially determined by the global characteristics of visit distributions.
  • The proposed method, applied to existing data, revealed modest lengthening effects of reinforcement on visit duration.

Conclusions:

  • Preference pulses may not solely represent local reinforcement effects due to significant influence from visit structure.
  • A residual preference pulse analysis is recommended to accurately assess local reinforcement impacts.
  • Findings support early research on short-term reinforcement effects, now quantitatively refined.