Modeling choice across time: Effects of response–reinforcer discriminability

Abstract

This experiment asks whether timing is affected by animals' discrimination of response-reinforcer contingencies, and if so, how this effect can be understood. Six pigeons were trained on a procedure in which concurrent-schedule reinforcer ratios between left and right keys changed at 30 s after the last reinforcer. One stimulus signaled a reinforcer-ratio reversal from 9:1 to 1:9 on that key, and the other stimulus signaled the inverse reversal, with the key on which these stimuli occurred randomized. Across conditions, the physical difference between the stimuli signaling the two responses was varied and the directional changes in the reinforcer ratio signaled by each stimulus were reversed. Choice changed appropriately across time when the two stimuli were discriminable, and points of subjective equality fell with decreasing stimulus difference. A model which assumed that reinforcers obtained in time bins were redistributed across other time bins according to ogivally changing standard deviations, and between response locations according to an ogivally changing redistribution measure, accounted well for the data. This model was shown to be preferable to one in which across-time redistributions were scalar, and across-location redistribution was constant. These results show the critical importance of stimulus-response-reinforcer discriminability to measures of timing.