2017/07/23 by Sarah Cowie, Michael Davison, Douglas Elliffe · 24 citations
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Medicine · Neuroscience · Psychology · Veterinary · #Animal Behavior and Welfare Studies #Animal Nutrition and Physiology #Artificial intelligence #Audiology #Behavioral and Psychological Studies #Cognitive psychology #Computer science #Discriminative model #Medicine #Neuroscience #Psychology #Reinforcement #Social psychology #Stimulus (psychology) #Stimulus control
paper · doi:10.1002/jeab.268
published in Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 108(2), 184-203 (Wiley)
crossref issued 2017/07/23 · crossref published 2017/07/23 · crossref published-online 2017/07/23 · openalex publication_date 2017/07/23 · crossref created 2017/07/24 · crossref published-print 2017/09/01 · crossref deposited 2023/10/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref indexed 2026/07/31 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
The extent to which a stimulus exerts control over behavior depends largely on its informativeness. However, when reinforcers have discriminative properties, they often exert less control over behavior than do other less reliable stimuli such as elapsed time. We investigated why less reliable cues in the present often overshadow stimulus control by more reliable cues presented in the recent past, by manipulating the reliability and duration of stimulus presentations. Five pigeons worked on a modified concurrent schedule in which the location of the response that produced the last reinforcer was a discriminative stimulus for the likely time and location of the next reinforcer. In some conditions, either the location of the previous reinforcer, or the location of the next reinforcer, was signaled by a red key light. This stimulus was either Brief, occurring for 10 s starting a fixed time after the most recent reinforcer, or Extended, being present at all times between food deliveries. Brief and Extended stimuli that signaled the same information had a similar effect on choice when they were present, but control by Brief stimuli weakened as time since stimulus offset elapsed. Control was divided among stimuli in the present and recent past according to the apparent reliability of the information signaled about the next reinforcer. More reliable stimuli in the present degraded, but did not erase, control by less reliable stimuli presented in the recent past. Thus, we conclude that less reliable stimuli in the present control behavior to a greater degree than do more reliable stimuli in the recent past because these more reliable stimuli are forgotten, and hence their relation to the likely availability of food cannot be discriminated.