Abstract
Rats had the option of pressing either of two stimulus levers to gain access to a third lever which produced food reinforcement on 20%, 50%, or 80% of the trials for different groups. One stimulus lever led to stimuli correlated with reward and no reward; the other lever always led to the same stimulus. Delay of reward facilitated choice of the correlated stimuli, while increasing deprivation time had equivocal effects. Ss rewarded on 20% and 50% of the trials increased their frequency of choice of the correlated stimuli, while the 80% group showed a decrease with respect to baseline responding.
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1. This study was supported in part by the Air Force Office of Aerospace Research under contract No. AF 49(638)-1614. Data were gathered while the authors were at the University of Delaware.
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McMichael, J.S., Lanzetta, J.T. & Driscoll, J.M. Infrequent reward facilitates observing responses in rats. Psychon Sci 8, 23–24 (1967). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03330648
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03330648