Time is experienced as passing more quickly the more changes happen in a situation. The present research tested the idea that time perception depends on the level of construal of the situation. Building on previous research showing that concrete rather than abstract mental construal causes people to perceive more variations in a given situation,…

Saccadic endpoint variability is often viewed as the outcome of neural noise occurring during sensorimotor processing. However, part of this variability might result from operant learning. We tested this hypothesis by reinforcing dispersions of saccadic amplitude distributions, while maintaining constant their medians. In a first experiment we…

This paper evaluates two classes of hypotheses about how people prosodically segment utterances: (1) meaning-based proposals, with a focus on Watson and Gibson's (2004) proposal, according to which speakers tend to produce boundaries before and after long constituents; and (2) balancing proposals, according to which speakers tend to produce…

The present study tested a formal, or purely mathematical, theory of matching, and a modern account derived by McDowell (1986) that incorporates deviations from strict matching--bias and sensitivity. Six humans pressed a lever for monetary reinforcers on five concurrent variable interval (VI) schedules of reinforcement. All schedules were…

Two experiments are reported in which the ratio of the average times spent in the terminal and initial links ("Tt/Ti") in concurrent chains was varied. In Experiment 1, pigeons responded in a three-component procedure in which terminal-link variable-interval schedules were in constant ratio, but their average duration increased across components…

Three experiments with pigeons studied the relation between time and rate measures of behavior under conditions of changing preference. Experiment 1 studied a concurrent chain schedule with random-interval initial links and fixed-interval terminal links; Experiment 2 studied a multiple chained random-interval fixed-interval schedule; and…

Rats obtained food-pellet reinforcers by nose poking a lighted key. Experiment 1 examined resistance to extinction following single-schedule training with different variable-interval schedules, ranging from a mean interval of 16 min to 0.25 min. That is, for each schedule, the rats received 20 consecutive daily baseline sessions and then a session…