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Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior logoLink to Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior
. 1975 Sep;24(2):157–171. doi: 10.1901/jeab.1975.24-157

Second-order schedules: discrimination of components1

Nancy Squires, James Norborg, Edmund Fantino
PMCID: PMC1333395  PMID: 16811868

Abstract

Pigeons were exposed to a series of second-order schedules in which the completion of a fixed number of fixed-interval components produced food. In Experiment 1, brief (2 sec) stimulus presentations occurred as each fixed-interval component was completed. During the brief-stimulus presentation terminating the last fixed-interval component, a response was required on a second key, the brief-stimulus key, to produce food. Responses on the brief-stimulus key before the last brief-stimulus presentation had no scheduled consequences, but served as a measure of the extent to which the final component was discriminated from preceding components. Whether there were one, two, four, or eight fixed-interval components, responses on the brief-stimulus key occurred during virtually every brief-stimulus presentation. In Experiment 2, an attempt was made to punish unnecessary responses on the brief-stimulus key, i.e., responses on the brief-stimulus key that occurred before the last component. None of the pigeons learned to withhold these responses, even though they produced a 15-sec timeout and loss of primary reinforcement. In Experiment 3, different key colors were associated with each component of a second-order schedule (a chain schedule). In contrast to Experiment 1, brief-stimulus key responses were confined to the last component. It was concluded that pigeons do not discriminate well between components of second-order schedules unless a unique exteroceptive cue is provided for each component. The relative discriminability of the components may account for the observed differences in initial-component response rates between comparable brief-stimulus, tandem, and chain schedules.

Keywords: second-order schedule, brief-stimulus presentations, chain schedule, conditioned reinforcement, temporal discrimination, fixed-interval schedule, 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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