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. 1995;12:31–41. doi: 10.1007/BF03392895

The effects of schedules of reinforcement on instruction-following in human subjects with verbal and nonverbal stimuli

Bobby Newman, Nancy S Hemmes, Dawn M Buffington, Steven Andreopoulos
PMCID: PMC2748540  PMID: 22477095

Abstract

The experiment reported here represents a partial replication of an experiment by Newman, Buffington, and Hemmes (in press) and analyzes responding in college students as a function of three different schedules of reinforcement (FR 1, FR 2, FR 3) and either verbal discriminative stimuli (instructions) or nonverbal discriminative stimuli (different colored cards). All consequences (tokens) were based on behavior consistent either with the verbal discriminative stimulus (SD) or with the nonverbal SD. The schedule of reinforcement varied across subjects, and accuracy of the verbal and nonverbal SDs varied across phases from. Results showed that the behavior of all continuous reinforcement (FR 1) subjects was sensitive to the accuracy of the verbal SDs, but the behavior of subjects in the nonverbal SD conditions showed more sensitivity than the behavior of subjects in verbal conditions under intermittent schedules (FR 2 and FR 3). These finding suggest that the behavior of subjects in experiments where instructions are sometimes pitted against actual contingencies of reinforcement is a function not only of the instruction, but also of the type of reinforcement schedule used.

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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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