Logo image
Conditioning of within-trial patterns of key pecking in pigeons
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Conditioning of within-trial patterns of key pecking in pigeons

E A Wasserman
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, Vol.28(3), pp.213-220
11/1977
DOI: 10.1901/jeab.1977.28-213
PMID: 16812030

View Online

Abstract

The possibility of conditioning systematic patterns of responding during brief discrete trials was studied by requiring hungry pigeons to key peck and then pause or to pause and then key peck in order to gain access to food. These schedules were highly effective in promoting decelerated and accelerated rates of responding, respectively, within individual trials; indeed, performance was quite similar to that observed when explicit external stimuli were correlated with "peck" and "pause" portions of the daily trials. Finally, schedules of reinforcement that did not selectively reinforce peck-pause or pause-peck patterns neither generated these patterns nor maintained them at the previous high levels. The results, therefore, confirm Shimp's (1976) proposal that organized groupings of discrete responses may function as operants-even in the absence of strict response-reinforcer contiguity.

Details

Metrics

Logo image