Stimulus Change as a Factor in Response Maintenance With Free Food Available

Osborne, Steve R.; Shelby, Michael D.

doi:10.1901/jeab.1975.24-17

Cited by 12 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Responding appeared to be controlled by the response-dependent presentation of a stimulus (hopper light) previously associated with response-dependent food. Osborne and Shelby (1975) extended these findings to a nonavian species. Following six alternating free and response-dependent food training sessions, rats were provided a choice between barpressing for pellets on CRF or obtaining them freely from a cup of 500 pellets.…”

Section: Stimulus Changementioning

confidence: 61%

“…Responding for food in the presence of free food might be attributed to the combined reinforcing effectiveness of responseproduced food and conditioned reinforcement provided by stimulus change. Neither responseproduced food alone (Osborne & Shelby, 1975;Wallace et al, 1973) nor resonse-produced stimulus change alone (Davidson, 1971;Duncan & Hughes, 1972;Enkema, Slavin, Spaeth, & Neuringer, 1972;Neuringer, 1969;Osborne & Shelby, 1975; are sufficient to maintain responding when free food is available. Yet, when responses produce both food and stimulus change, many responses are emitted.…”

Section: Conditioned Reinforcementmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The free food (contrafreeloading) phenomenon: A review and analysis

Osborne

1977

Animal Learning & Behavior

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205

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Anima1s will perform an operant response to obtain food when abundant free food is availab1e. These data have implications for current 1earning theories, especial1y in terms of the motivationa1 variables associated with such behavior. The present paper reviews the literature and provides an analysis that suggests that responding for food in the presence of free food is importantly controlled by stimulus change attendant upon response-dependent food presentation. This apparent stimulus-reinforcer effect on behavior is compared to that observed in other areas of anima1 1earning research that include preference between schedu1es of responsedependent and response-independent reinforcement, preference between schedu1es of signa1ed and unsigna1ed reinforcement, autoshaping and automaintenance, and self-reinforcement in anima1s.When an animal is provided a choice between making an operant response to obtain food or by eating it from a source of continuously available free food, a curious thing happens. Animals not only acquire and continue to make the operant response, but they often appear to "prefer" the responsedependent food. That animals respond for food in the presence of identical free food is by now a wellestablished finding in the experimentalliterature.

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Section: Stimulus Changementioning

confidence: 61%

Section: Conditioned Reinforcementmentioning

confidence: 99%

The free food (contrafreeloading) phenomenon: A review and analysis

Osborne

1977

Animal Learning & Behavior

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205

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“…That is, a rating of causal effectiveness is given to a target when it is followed by any stimulus, irrespective of whether it is the outcome of interest or not. Indeed, Osborne and Shelby (1975) have suggested changes in sensory presentations in the environments can motivate responding, which might suggest that any additional stimulus change, if delivered at a sufficiently high rate, might serve to increase levels of context conditioning. In the response-independent conditions, the rate of stimulus presentation may have impacted on the ratings through this mechanism -an explanation which may also apply to the previous findings of Matute (1996;Blanco et al, 2011;2012).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Response-independent outcomes impact response rates and judgments of control differentially depending on rate of response-dependent outcomes

Reed

2015

Learn Behav

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Two experiments examined the impact of responseindependent outcome delivery on human rates of response and judgments of control in an instrumental conditioning task. In Experiment 1, when participants responded on a schedule with a relatively high probability of a response producing an outcome, a random ratio (RR-5), judgments of control declined as rates of response-independent outcomes increased. However, when response-dependent outcomes were delivered with a relatively low probability (RR-15), increasing the rate of response-independent outcomes increased rates of response and judgments of control. Experiment 2 replicated this effect, but also noted a differential effect of response-independent outcome and response-independent sensory presentations on response rate and judgments of causal effectiveness. Ratings of the context in which the conditioning occurred suggested these were correlated with total outcome presentation, and that the role of context on response rate and judgments of control may be important to consider.Keywords Judgment of control . Response rate . Response-independent outcomes . Context conditioning . Humans Understanding the conditions impacting judgments of control is important across a range of areas: basic cognitive functioning (Allan, 1993;Cheng, 1997;Einhorn & Hogarth, 1986;Nevin & Grace, 2000), applications in psychopathologies (Alloy & Abramson, 1979;Blanco, Matute, & Vadillo, 2012), development of therapies (Dimidjian, Barrera, Martell, Muñoz, & Lewinsohn, 2011;Koller & Kaplan, 1978), as well as in social (Crocker, 1981) and economic (Fenton-O'Creevy, Nicholson, Soane, & Willman, 2003;Reed, 1999) psychology. The circumstances under which the causal structure of the environment can be understood are also thought to be important across species (Alloy & Tabachnik, 1984;Wasserman, 1990). The latter suggestion has prompted a range of studies using procedures that are analogous to classical (Blanco, Matute, & Vadillo, 2011;Miller & Matute, 1996a) and instrumental (Reed, 1999(Reed, , 2001aWasserman, Chatlosh, & Neunaber, 1983) conditioning to explore the factors implicated in developing judgments of causation. Although these procedures do not employ Bbiologically^rel-evant stimuli (like food), they share procedural similarities with conditioning studies in which a response or stimuli is presented prior to an outcome.The similarity of findings between causal reasoning and learning studies depends on a wide number of factors (Miller & Matute, 1996b), including whether the task requires the individual to gain outcomes or assess the response-outcome relationships (Matute, 1996;Reed, 2001a). In fact, different processes operate when the outcome is hedonically or biologically neutral, as in most tasks of causal reasoning (Blanco et al., 2011), and when the outcome has some hedonic (Reed, 1994) or biological (Miller & Matute, 1996b) significance. The current series of experiments focuses on exploring causal judgments in a task retaining significant components of an instrumental condit...

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“…Regarding conditions of maintenance, it has been well established that rats and pigeons will continue to respond for food in the presence of free food after they have been trained to respond in the absence of free food (e.g., Carder & Berkowitz, 1970;Carlson & Riccio, 1976;Jensen, 1963;Knutson & Carlson, 1973;Neuringer, 1970;Osborne & Shelby, 1975;Singh, 1970;Tarte, Townsend, Vernon, & Rovner, 1974). In many of these studies, response-produced food constituted more than 90070 of the subjects' total food intake during sessions in which both response-produced and free food were available.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%