Abstract
Three experiments examined human rates and patterns of responding during exposure to various schedules of reinforcement with or without a concurrent task. In the presence of the concurrent task, performances were similar to those typically noted for nonhumans. Overall response rates were higher on medium-sized ratio schedules than on smaller or larger ratio schedules (Experiment 1), on interval schedules with shorter than longer values (Experiment 2), and on ratio compared with interval schedules with the same rate of reinforcement (Experiment 3). Moreover, bout-initiation responses were more susceptible to influence by rates of reinforcement than were within-bout responses across all experiments. In contrast, in the absence of a concurrent task, human schedule performance did not always display characteristics of nonhuman performance, but tended to be related to the relationship between rates of responding and reinforcement (feedback function), irrespective of the schedule of reinforcement employed. This was also true of within-bout responding, but not bout-initiations, which were not affected by the presence of a concurrent task. These data suggest the existence of two strategies for human responding on free-operant schedules, relatively mechanistic ones that apply to bout-initiation, and relatively explicit ones, that tend to apply to within-bout responding, and dominate human performance when other demands are not made on resources.
Highlights
Three experiments examined human rates and patterns of responding during exposure to various schedules of reinforcement with or without a concurrent task
For the control group, response rates decreased as the ratio value increased
For the concurrent task group, response rates were highest for the random ratio (RR)-30 condition, compared with the RR-10 and RR-60 schedule conditions A two-factor mixed-model analysis of variance (ANOVA), with group as a between-subject factor, and schedule (RR-10, RR-30, RR60) as a within-subject factor, was conducted on these data
Summary
Forty-five participants (25 female and 20 male), with a mean age of 20.15 (±2.44, range: 18–26) years, were recruited. As previous studies have demonstrated that individuals scoring highly in terms of depression and schizotypy show atypical patterns of schedule performance (Dack et al, 2009; Randell et al, 2009), participants with high psychometric test scores in these areas were excluded; five participants were excluded on this basis, leaving 40 participants in the study. A score of greater than 6 on the Unusual Experiences scale (one standard deviation above the mean; Mason et al, 2005) was taken as a cutoff for individuals displaying high levels of this trait, who display atypical performance (Randell et al, 2009). A score higher than 10 was taken as a cutoff for individuals displaying high levels of depression, producing atypical schedule performance (Dack et al, 2009). Participants were prompted to continue the counting task if they paused
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