Insensitivity to Post-Reinforcement Delay in the Choices of Pigeons and Humans

Research on choice behavior has helped us to identify many of the variables that determine the decisions we make, leading to better predictions of these behaviors and the development of technologies for their modification. However, research on decision-making in situations of negative punishment is...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inRevista internacional de psicología y terapia psicológica Vol. 24; no. 3; pp. 399 - 418
Main Authors Polín, Eduardo, Pérez, Vicente
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published 2024
Subjects
commitment response
control
humans
pigeons
post
reinforcement delay
self
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Summary:Research on choice behavior has helped us to identify many of the variables that determine the decisions we make, leading to better predictions of these behaviors and the development of technologies for their modification. However, research on decision-making in situations of negative punishment is scarce compared to other conditions, such as reinforcement or positive punishment, at least in studies with non-human subjects. The present paper tries to address this question through four experiments on choice behavior by pigeons and humans. The aims of the first experiment (with four pigeons) were to study the validity of considering the duration of access to the reinforcer as the length of the delay of the consequence, and the duration of the inter-trial interval as the degree of negative punishment, in a concurrent program in which these parameters were varied. Results showed insensitivity to the length of the inter-trial interval, a phenomenon that was replicated with forty-seven human participants under an analogous procedure in experiment 2. Experiment 3 (with four pigeons and fifty-one humans) and experiment 4 (with twelve pigeons and one hundred ninety-seven humans) explored the efficacy in increasing this sensitivity of including differential contexts during post-reinforcement delays and/or commitment response. Results revealed a greater isolated effect of the commitment response and a markedly reduced effect of the differential contexts. The main conclusion of this work is that choices are affected very little by the duration of the post-reinforcement delay, although this insensitivity can be slightly reduced by requiring a commitment response
ISSN:1577-7057