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. 1979 May;31(3):333–343. doi: 10.1901/jeab.1979.31-333

Temporal control of behavior and the power law1

C Fergus Lowe, Peter Harzem, Peter T Spencer
PMCID: PMC1332863  PMID: 16812135

Abstract

The performance of rats and pigeons under fixed-interval schedules was studied in two experiments. The duration of postreinforcement pause was a declining proportion of fixed-interval duration. For pigeons this was true both when the duration of the reinforcer was fixed and when it was increased in direct proportion to increases in fixed-interval duration; the longer reinforcer durations did, however, lengthen the postreinforcement pause at higher schedule values. A quantitative analysis of data from Experiments 1 and 2 and from other studies showed that fractional exponent power functions described the relationship between postreinforcement pause and fixed-interval value; similar functions have previously been observed in studies of temporal differentiation. It was concluded that power functions reflect a direct causal, rather than artifactual, relationship between performance and the temporal requirements of reinforcement schedules.

Keywords: Postreinforcement pause, power law, temporal control, fixed-interval, reinforcement magnitude, psychophysical scaling, rats, 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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