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. 1979 Jan;31(1):23–29. doi: 10.1901/jeab.1979.31-23

Conditioning of two-response patterns of key pecking in pigeons1

Rebecca J Grayson, Edward A Wasserman
PMCID: PMC1332786  PMID: 16812119

Abstract

On discrete trials, two response keys were made available to hungry pigeons and food reinforcement depended on the order in which the required two key pecks occurred. In different phases, only one of the four possible two-peck sequences (left-left, left-right, right-left, and right-right) produced food reinforcement. In each case, the pigeons learned to perform the correct two-peck sequence more often than the incorrect sequences. Furthermore, the course of differentiation mastery indicated that both reinforcement history and response-reinforcer contiguity influenced performance. These results reveal that response patterns comprising two instances of the same response left-left and right-right) or instances of two different responses (left-right and right-left) may function as operants, thereby extending the generality of conditioning principles from discrete responses to structured sequences of behavior. These and other results are discussed in terms of contiguity-based and memory-based models of learning.

Keywords: response differentiation, response patterning, procedural-functional operant, response-reinforcer contiguity, short-term memory, key peck, pigeons

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Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

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