Abstract

COSTA, Carlos Eduardo; LACERDA, Raquel Fernanda Ferreira; PAULINO, Lucas Roberto Pedrão  and  BANACO, Roberto Alves. Effects of a FR history on responses rate in FI and DRL. Perspectivas [online]. 2014, vol.5, n.1, pp. 1-16. ISSN 2177-3548.

Two experiments were conducted to assess if high response rates, selected by FR, would be equally affected when the schedule of reinforcement changed to FI and DRL. Undergraduate students were exposed to the following sequence of reinforcement schedules: FR-FI-FR-DRL. In Experiment 1, five participants were exposed to each schedule for three, 30 min, sessions and each schedule was correlated with a different color of the response button. In Experiment 2, four participants were exposed to each schedule for six, 30 min, sessions and the color of the response button was the same across schedules. In both experiments, response rates were high for all the participants under the FR. When the schedule of reinforcement changed to an FI, (a) response rates decreased for four of nine participants; (b) when the schedule changed to a DRL, response rates decreased for all participants. These results were not affected by the schedules being correlated (Experiment 1) or not (Experiment 2) with different stimuli, except under the initial minutes of exposure to the FI schedule.

Keywords : behavioral history; behavioral persistence; schedules of reinforcement; sensitivity; humans.

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