Effects of pre- and post-reinforcer delays on choice in pigeons

Abstract

The present study examined effects of pre- and post-reinforcer delays on pigeons' choice using concurrent-chains schedules. Subjects were exposed to concurrent-chains schedules in which a single variable-interval 30-s schedule was arranged for the initial link, followed by different fixed-time schedules for pre- and post-reinforcer delays as the terminal links. The pre- and post-reinforcer delays were fixed at 2 s for one alternative and they were manipulated across conditions (2 s, 8 s, 20 s, or 40 s) for the other alternative. Based on the sensitivities estimated from the overall reinforcement density model, it is suggested that pigeons have higher sensitivity to the pre-reinforcer delay relative to the post-reinforcer delay. These results are consistent with those reported in a previous study using rats. Comparisons of choice proportion data from different post-reinforcer delays reveal that pigeons have sensitivity to post-reinforcer delay, although it is not high.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.