Publications [#288147] of John E. Staddon
search www.pbs.duke.edu.Papers Published
- Cerutti, DT; Staddon, JER, Time and rate measures in choice transitions.,
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, vol. 81 no. 2
(March, 2004),
pp. 135-154 [Gateway.cgi], [doi] .
(last updated on 2025/03/09)Abstract:
Three experiments with pigeons studied the relation between time and rate measures of behavior under conditions of changing preference. Experiment 1 studied a concurrent chain schedule with random-interval initial links and fixed-interval terminal links; Experiment 2 studied a multiple chained random-interval fixed-interval schedule; and Experiment 3 studied simple concurrent random-interval random-interval schedules. In Experiment 1, and to a lesser extent in the other two experiments, session-average initial-link wait-time differences were linearly related to session-average response-rate differences. In Experiment 1, and to a lesser extent in Experiment 3, ratios of session-average initial-link wait times and response rates were related by a power function. The weaker relations between wait and response measures in Experiment 2 appear to be due to the absence of competition between responses. In Experiments 1 and 2, initial-link changes lagged behind terminal-link changes. These findings may have implications for the relations between fixed- and variable-interval procedures and suggest that more attention should be paid to temporal measures in studies of free-operant choice.