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. 1984 Mar;41(2):143–155. doi: 10.1901/jeab.1984.41-143

The effects of delayed reinforcement on free-operant responding

Jeffrey Lee Weil
PMCID: PMC1348028  PMID: 16812363

Abstract

In previous studies of delayed reinforcement, response rate has been found to vary inversely with the response-reinforcer interval. However, in all of these studies the independent variable, response-reinforcer time, was confounded with the number of reinforcers presented in a fixed period of time (reinforcer frequency). In the present study, the frequency of available reinforcers was held constant, while temporal separation between response and reinforcer was independently manipulated. A repeating time cycle, T, was divided into two alternating time periods, tD and tΔ. The first response in tD was reinforced at the end of the prevailing T cycle and extinction prevailed in tΔ. Two placements for tD were defined, an early tD placement in which tD precedes tΔ and a late tD placement in which tD follows tΔ. The duration of the early and late tD was systematically decreased from 30 seconds (i.e., tD = T) to 0.1 second. Manipulation of tD placement and duration controlled the temporal separation between response and reinforcement, but it did not affect the frequency of programmed reinforcers, which was 1/T. The results show that early and late tD placements of equal duration have similar overall effects upon response rate, reinforcer frequency, responses per reinforcer, and obtained response-reinforcer temporal separation. A stepwise regression analysis using log response rate as the dependent variable showed that the obtained delay was a significant first-step variable for six of eight subjects, with obtained reinforcer frequency significant for the remaining two subjects.

Keywords: variable-delay schedules of reinforcement, reinforcement delay, delay-reduction hypothesis, 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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