In our everyday life, we often need to anticipate the potential occurrence of events and their consequences. In this context, the way we represent contingencies can determine our ability to adapt to the environment. However, it is not clear how agents encode and organize available knowledge about the future to react to possible states of the…

The present study investigated the effect of the presence of the experimenter on behavioral sensitivity to contingency change. In history training, college students were exposed to differential reinforcement of low rate (DRL) and fixed-ratio (FR) schedules, and in testing, to a fixed-interval (FI) schedule. For the control group, instructions were…

The authors examined the effects of randomized and delayed credit on the percentage of college students participating at four pre-defined levels on each class discussion day: non-participation, credit-level participation, frequent participation, and dominant participation. Although the same amount of participation credit was available to students…