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QUANTIFICATION OF RATS' BEHAVIOR DURING REINFORCEMENT PERIODS
Author(s) -
Gunn Kenneth P.
Publication year - 1983
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.1983.39-457
Subject(s) - reinforcement , animal behavior , computer science , behavioral analysis , psychology , artificial intelligence , cognitive psychology , social psychology , biology , zoology
What is treated as a single unit of reinforcement often involves what could be called a reinforcement period during which two or more acts of ingestion may occur, and each of these may have associated with it a series of responses, some reflexive, some learned, that lead up to ingestion. Food‐tray presentation to a pigeon is an example of such a “reinforcement period.” In order to quantify this behavior, a continuous‐reinforcement schedule was used as the reinforcement period and was chained to a fixed‐ratio schedule. Both fixed‐ratio size and reinforcement‐period duration were manipulated. Rats were used as subjects, food as reinforcement, and a lever press as the operant. Major findings included (a) a rapid decline in response rates during the first 15 to 20 seconds of the reinforcement periods, and (b) a strong positive relationship between these response rates and the size of the fixed ratio. Also revealed was a short scallop not normally found in fixed‐ratio response patterns, whose length was a function of fixed‐ratio size and reinforcement‐period duration. It is suggested that rapidly fluctuating excitatory processes can account for many of these findings and that such processes are functionally significant in terms of behavioral compensation.