Behavioral ephemera, difficult discriminations, and behavioral stability | JoVE Visualize

Area of Science:

Behavioral science
Animal cognition
Comparative psychology

Background:

Organisms possess inherent abilities shaped by phylogeny for environmental interaction.
Laboratory settings can create artificial conditions that temporarily impede these abilities, leading to observable phenomena.
These phenomena are often transient, with organisms' fundamental abilities re-emerging after adaptation.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the ephemeral nature of certain behavioral phenomena observed under artificial laboratory conditions.
To determine if phenomena like behavioral contrast and suboptimal choice disappear with sufficient training and parameter variation.
To understand the role of discriminative abilities in the manifestation and disappearance of these behavioral effects.

Main Methods:

Utilized a concurrent-chains procedure with pigeons, pitting preference for unimpeded responding against food acquisition rate.
Manipulated timeout durations in one terminal link of variable-interval schedules, where food rates were equal across options.
Systematically varied experimental parameters and provided extensive training to observe changes in behavioral phenomena.

Main Results:

Pigeons' preference for unimpeded responding diminished when timeout durations varied, vanishing with training as food rates remained equal.
Other phenomena, including behavioral contrast, conditioned reinforcement, resistance to extinction, and suboptimal choice, also tended to disappear with sufficient training and parameter variation.
The results indicate that these "phenomena" are contingent upon an organism's failure to make difficult discriminations.

Conclusions:

Behavioral phenomena that appear under artificial laboratory conditions are often ephemeral and disappear with adaptation and training.
Organisms' fundamental abilities to interact with their environment reassert themselves when experimental conditions are varied or training is sufficient.
These findings suggest that many observed "phenomena" are not fundamental behavioral principles but rather temporary outcomes dependent on specific, often difficult, discriminative challenges.