SURPRISE! PIGEONS AND HUMANS RESPOND SIMILARLY TO UNEXPECTED REINFORCERS

Abstract

When a reinforcer for one behavior is usually followed by a reinforcer for a different behavior, organisms choose the response likely to produce the next reinforcer. This pattern of behavior may suggest prospective control resulting from learned relations between reinforcers, or it may reflect strengthening of switching, rather than of a single response. We sought to assess further the degree to which operant behavior can be explained in terms of prospective processes. We asked whether reinforcers could guide pigeons’ and children’s behavior as a result of prospective processes, both when those reinforcers strictly alternated between responses in a predictable sequence, and when they occurred at a surprising point in that sequence. Pigeons and children learned to choose the response that did not provide the most recent reinforcer, and tended to treat surprising reinforcers in just the same way as predictable ones. The tendency to choose the not-just-reinforced response after surprising reinforcers as well as expected ones is consistent with the idea that reinforcers guide behaviour via their discriminative properties, rather than by strengthening operant classes. Our findings replicate and extend previous work showing reinforcer control depends on what a reinforcer signals about the likely future, rather than on the behavior most recently reinforced in the past.