TY - JOUR
T1 - Affordances Guide Choice Behavior between Equal Schedules of Reinforcement in Rats
AU - Jiménez, Ángel Andrés
AU - Ochoa, Denisse A.
AU - Amazeen, Polemnia G.
AU - Amazeen, Eric L.
AU - Cabrera, Felipe
N1 - Funding Information:
Portions of this research were presented at the 2017 International Seminar on Behavior and Applications (SINCA) conference hosted in Tlaxcala, Mexico, and the 2018 North American Meeting of the International Society for Ecological Psychology in Normal, Illinois, United States. Some of these data served as a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the second author's Bachelor's degree in psychology at the University of Guadalajara. The authors would like to thank Maryed Rojas for writing the code used to run the experimental chambers, Daniel Zarabozo for helpful comments, and to undergraduate students Daniel González Romo and Jesús Guzmán for their help with data collection. Particular appreciation is due to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, © 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
PY - 2019/10/2
Y1 - 2019/10/2
N2 - Operant choice theories pose that behavior distribution between options is ruled by the consequences related with these options. Evidence suggests that rats’ performance is attuned to the affordances that the operant setting provides, such as lever height. Our aim was to explore in rats whether lever press distribution was influenced by the affordances furnished by two levers. Lever pressing was reinforced in two concurrent equal variable-ratio schedules of reinforcement, and in successive conditions lever height was varied asymmetrically—that is, one lever was higher than the other. Results showed a quadratic relation between response rates and lever height, a linear trend between preference and lever height, and higher between- and within-bout response rates on the lower lever in four out of the six pairs of lever heights assessed. These findings suggest that intermediate lever heights favored lever pressing with faster bout initiation and faster within-bout responding, and support the idea that preorganized properties of behavior (i.e., the organism’s abilities) interact with the environment before the operant contingency takes place.
AB - Operant choice theories pose that behavior distribution between options is ruled by the consequences related with these options. Evidence suggests that rats’ performance is attuned to the affordances that the operant setting provides, such as lever height. Our aim was to explore in rats whether lever press distribution was influenced by the affordances furnished by two levers. Lever pressing was reinforced in two concurrent equal variable-ratio schedules of reinforcement, and in successive conditions lever height was varied asymmetrically—that is, one lever was higher than the other. Results showed a quadratic relation between response rates and lever height, a linear trend between preference and lever height, and higher between- and within-bout response rates on the lower lever in four out of the six pairs of lever heights assessed. These findings suggest that intermediate lever heights favored lever pressing with faster bout initiation and faster within-bout responding, and support the idea that preorganized properties of behavior (i.e., the organism’s abilities) interact with the environment before the operant contingency takes place.
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U2 - 10.1080/10407413.2019.1599686
DO - 10.1080/10407413.2019.1599686
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85065535264
SN - 1040-7413
VL - 31
SP - 316
EP - 331
JO - Ecological Psychology
JF - Ecological Psychology
IS - 4
ER -