CS-UCS presentations and a lever: Human autoshaping.

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Abstract
Conducted 6 experiments with 30 college students to investigate similarities and differences between animal and human behavior under autoshaping procedures. The naive, uninstructed Ss were placed in a room containing a lever, a translucent panel, and a slot for pennies. Within an experimental session, the translucent panel was lit (conditioned stimulus) for 5-sec duration on a variable-interval 20-sec schedule for 5 min and was then paired with penny delivery for 12 min. It is concluded that in the present experimental situation, humans (a) brought a prepotent response to the situation which became temporally controlled by a neutral stimulus predictive of reinforcement; (b) behaved as if environmental events (usually the unconditioned stimulus, UCS) were under response control and appeared to test hypotheses about response production of the UCS; and (c) demonstrated that human autoshaping processes are different from rat or pigeon autoshaping processes, although both animals and humans show similarities in response tendency. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)

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