The effects of feature type in operant serial feature-positive discriminations☆
Section snippets
Experiment 1
In Goddard and Holland’s study (1996, Experiment 1), sucrose delivery served as both a feature and as the reinforcer for correct responding during the targets. As a result, reinforcement of responding during either of the targets provided response-contingent presentations of the sucrose feature. Likewise, presentations of the sucrose feature could be viewed as response-independent presentations of the reinforcer, which are known to affect instrumental responding. Thus, the sucrose feature was
Experiment 2
Goddard and Holland (1996) suggested that flavor features that possess substantial intrinsic reinforcing properties, including high palatability or nutritional value, may be treated differently from light and tone features that do not possess those properties. Alternately, they pointed out that flavor features also differ substantially from auditory or visual features because they require the rats to engage in both preparatory (approach the liquid cup) and consummatory responses (lick the
General discussion
Goddard and Holland (1996) explicitly compared the performances of rats trained on operant serial feature positive discriminations with visual and flavored sucrose (hedonically significant) features. They found that whereas within each of these classes of features a feature’s occasion setting ability readily transferred to the target of another occasion setter, no such transfer was observed between feature classes. The results of the present experiments suggested that this failure to show
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Darlene Skinner is now with the Memorial University of Newfoundland, Jennifer Thornton is now with the David Grant USAF Medical Center, and Peter Holland is now with the Johns Hopkins University. This work was supported by the Human Frontier Science Program. Portions of these data were described in a chapter by Skinner, Goddard, and Holland (1998).