Premium
TIME‐ALLOCATION MATCHING BETWEEN PUNISHING SITUATIONS 1
Author(s) -
Deluty Marvin Z.,
Church Russell M.
Publication year - 1978
Publication title -
journal of the experimental analysis of behavior
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.75
H-Index - 61
eISSN - 1938-3711
pISSN - 0022-5002
DOI - 10.1901/jeab.1978.29-191
Subject(s) - component (thermodynamics) , schedule , noise (video) , lever , time allocation , white noise , matching law , shock (circulatory) , matching (statistics) , computer science , psychology , statistics , artificial intelligence , mathematics , telecommunications , medicine , economics , engineering , physics , management , image (mathematics) , thermodynamics , operating system , mechanical engineering
In the presence and absence of white noise, response‐independent aversive events were delivered to rats according to several variable‐time electric‐shock schedules. The animals could switch from the noise component to the no‐noise component and vice versa by making a single lever‐press response. If the schedule in one component was not in operation when the animal was in the other component, the proportion of time allocated to one component equalled or matched the proportion of obtained punishers in the other component. If both schedules were always in operation, minimizing tended to occur: the animals allocated almost all of their time to the component having the lower shock rate. An analysis of these results, in terms of the expected time until an aversive event, is presented.