Blocking despite changes in reinforcer identity

Abstract

Rats were trained on a discriminated operant barpressing task according to a standard blocking design. In some conditions, the reinforcer was changed between the pretraining and compound conditioning phases; for other conditions, the reinforcer remained the same across phases. In three separate experiments using both between- and within-subject designs, strong blocking effects occurred regardless of the change in the reinforcer. In a fourth experiment, a multiple schedule of reinforcement was used in which response-independent reinforcers were superimposed on the schedule of response-contingent reinforcers. The degree of response suppression caused by the free reinforcer was greater when the free reinforcers were the same as the response-contingent reinforcers than when they were different. The role played by the reinforcer identity in contingency experiments thus appears to be different from the role it plays in blocking experiments.