Abstract
Pigeons were exposed to a compound of 5 sec of 2,000-Hz tone immediately followed by 5-sec access to food on a variable-time (VT) 1-min schedule. Little or no pecking at the speaker from which the tone came was observed in 15 birds. Six other birds were exposed to a compound of 5 sec of keylight immediately followed by 5 sec of food on a VT 1-min schedule. The keylight and food pairings generated large amounts of sustained keypecking by all six birds. These results favor a species-specific preparedness interpretation rather than a Pavlovian conditioning explanation of automaintenance.
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This work was supported by Grants PS-6891, PS-6977, and PS-7453 from the TCU Research Foundation. Some of the data reported here were presented at the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Denver, 1975.
R. B. Boe had moved to the J. F. Kennedy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, when he unexpectedly died. A draft of this paper was found in his effects and completed by Winokur at the request of Mrs. Boe.
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Boe, R.B., Winokur, S. Positive automaintenance does not produce sustained pecking to a tone. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 14, 67–70 (1979). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03329402
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03329402