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McDevitt, Margaret A.; Williams, Ben A. – Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2010
Pigeons were presented with a concurrent-chains schedule in which the total time to primary reinforcement was equated for the two alternatives (VI 30 s VI 60 s vs. VI 60 s VI 30 s). In one set of conditions, the terminal links were signaled by the same stimulus, and in another set of conditions they were signaled by different stimuli. Choice was…
Descriptors: Stimuli, Reinforcement, Conditioning, Animals
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Koffarnus, Mikhail N.; Jarmolowicz, David P.; Mueller, E. Terry; Bickel, Warren K. – Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2013
Excessively devaluing delayed reinforcers co-occurs with a wide variety of clinical conditions such as drug dependence, obesity, and excessive gambling. If excessive delay discounting is a trans-disease process that underlies the choice behavior leading to these and other negative health conditions, efforts to change an individual's discount rate…
Descriptors: Delay of Gratification, Conceptual Tempo, Reinforcement, Therapy
Shahan, Timothy A. – Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2010
Stimuli associated with primary reinforcers appear themselves to acquire the capacity to strengthen behavior. This paper reviews research on the strengthening effects of conditioned reinforcers within the context of contemporary quantitative choice theories and behavioral momentum theory. Based partially on the finding that variations in…
Descriptors: Stimuli, Reinforcement, Responses, Conditioning
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Fields, Lanny; Watanabe-Rose, Mari – Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2008
By definition, all of the stimuli in an equivalence class have to be functionally interchangeable with each other. The present experiment, however, demonstrated that this was not the case when using post-class-formation dual-option response transfer tests. With college students, two 4-node 6-member equivalence classes with nodal structures of…
Descriptors: Stimuli, Classification, Operant Conditioning, College Students
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Valverde, Miguel Rodriguez; Luciano, Carmen; Barnes-Holmes, Dermot – Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2009
The present study investigates the transfer of aversively conditioned respondent elicitation through equivalence classes, using skin conductance as the measure of conditioning. The first experiment is an attempt to replicate Experiment 1 in Dougher, Augustson, Markham, Greenway, and Wulfert (1994), with different temporal parameters in the…
Descriptors: Stimuli, Conditioning, Experiments, Evaluation Methods
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Fantino, Edmund; Romanowich, Paul – Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2007
We review the nature of conditioned reinforcement, including evidence that conditioned reinforcers maintain choice behavior in concurrent schedules and that they elevate responding in the terminal links of concurrent-chains schedules. A question has resurfaced recently: Do theories of choice in concurrent-chains schedules need to include a term…
Descriptors: Reinforcement, Conditioning, Selection, Preferences
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Horne, Pauline J.; Lowe, C. Fergus; Harris, Fay D. A. – Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2007
Following pre-training with everyday objects, 8 children aged from 2 to 4 years learned to produce one manual sign (fists placed one above the other, in front of body) to one stimulus and an alternative manual sign (shoulders touched with ipsilateral hands) to the other stimulus, with each of three pairs of different arbitrary wooden shapes (Set…
Descriptors: Young Children, Naming, Classification, Stimuli
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Davison, Michael; Krageloh, Christian U.; Fraser, Mhoyra; Breier, Bernhard H. – Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2007
Two groups of 10 male rats were trained to nose poke for food pellets at four alternatives that provided differing rates of pellet delivery on aperiodic schedules. After a fixed number of pellets had been delivered, 5, 10 or 20 in different conditions of the experiment, a 10-s blackout occurred, and the locations of the differing rates of pellet…
Descriptors: Pregnancy, Computation, Nutrition, Mothers
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Swaddle, John P.; Johnson, Charles W. – Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2007
Small deviations from bilateral symmetry (fluctuating asymmetries) are cues to fitness differences in some animals. Therefore, researchers have considered whether animals use these small asymmetries as visual cues to determine appropriate behavioral responses (e.g., mate preferences). However, there have been few systematic studies of animals'…
Descriptors: Animals, Animal Behavior, Cues, Visual Discrimination
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Thompson, Travis – Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2007
This paper proposes that an organism's integrated repertoire of operant behavior has the status of a biological system, similar to other biological systems, like the nervous, cardiovascular, or immune systems. Evidence from a number of sources indicates that the distinctions between biological and behavioral events is often misleading, engendering…
Descriptors: Behavioral Sciences, Biology, Behavior, Reinforcement
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Lattal, Kennon A. – Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2004
From its inception in the 1930s until very recent times, the cumulative recorder was the most widely used measurement instrument in the experimental analysis of behavior. It was an essential instrument in the discovery and analysis of schedules of reinforcement, providing the first real-time analysis of operant response rates and patterns. This…
Descriptors: Operant Conditioning, Positive Reinforcement, Behavioral Science Research, Measurement Techniques