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TIME AND RATE MEASURES IN CHOICE TRANSITIONS
Author(s) -
Cerutti D. T.,
Staddon J. E. R.
Publication year - 2004
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.2004.81-135
Subject(s) - interval (graph theory) , statistics , schedule , session (web analytics) , preference , mathematics , psychology , computer science , combinatorics , world wide web , operating system
Three experiments with pigeons studied the relation between time and rate measures of behavior under conditions of changing preference. Experiment 1 studied a concurrent chain schedule with random‐interval initial links and fixed‐interval terminal links; Experiment 2 studied a multiple chained random‐interval fixed‐interval schedule; and Experiment 3 studied simple concurrent random‐interval random‐interval schedules. In Experiment 1, and to a lesser extent in the other two experiments, session‐average initial‐link wait‐time differences were linearly related to session‐average response‐rate differences. In Experiment 1, and to a lesser extent in Experiment 3, ratios of session‐average initial‐link wait times and response rates were related by a power function. The weaker relations between wait and response measures in Experiment 2 appear to be due to the absence of competition between responses. In Experiments 1 and 2, initial‐link changes lagged behind terminal‐link changes. These findings may have implications for the relations between fixed‐ and variable‐interval procedures and suggest that more attention should be paid to temporal measures in studies of free‐operant choice.