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- Title
Decreased Key Pecking in Response to Reward Uncertainty and Surprising Delay Extension in Pigeons.
- Authors
Wittek, Neslihan; Wittek, Kevin; Güntürkün, Onur; Anselme, Patrick
- Abstract
The Pavlovian autoshaping paradigm has often been used to assess the behavioral effects of reward omission on behavior. We trained pigeons to receive a food reward (unconditioned stimulus, or UCS) following illumination of a response key (conditioned stimulus, or CS). In Experiment 1, 1 group of pigeons was trained with two 100% predictive CS-UCS associations (reward certainty) and another group with two 25% predictive CS-UCS associations (reward uncertainty) for 12 sessions. In both groups, the 2 CS durations were 8 s. Then, in each group, the duration of 1 CS remained unchanged and that of the other CS was suddenly extended from 8 to 24 s for 6 sessions. In Experiment 2, some experienced individuals (from Experiment 1) and naïve individuals formed 2 groups trained with a 24-s CS throughout for 18 sessions. Our results show that pigeons (a) pecked less at the uncertain than the certain CS, (b) decreased and then increased CS-pecking after extending the CS duration, especially in the certainty condition, (c) were unresponsive to the 24- s CS in the absence of previous experience, and (d) decreased their response rate close to the end of a trial irrespective of the reinforcement condition, CS duration, and amount of training. These results are discussed in relation to several theoretical frameworks.
- Subjects
REWARD (Psychology); PIGEONS; STIMULUS &; response (Psychology); REINFORCEMENT (Psychology); DELAY discounting (Psychology)
- Publication
International Journal of Comparative Psychology, 2021, Vol 34, p1
- ISSN
0889-3667
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.46867/ijcp.2021.34.00.02