Secondary reinforcement and magnitude of primary reinforcement.
- 1 January 1955
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Psychological Association (APA) in Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology
- Vol. 48 (5) , 378-380
- https://doi.org/10.1037/h0041068
Abstract
Rats were given 70 trials in a straight alleyway under 23 hour food deprivation; 35 trials were rewarded with high reward (5 food pellets) and 35 with low reward (1 pellet) in discriminably different goal boxes. When non-rewarded test trials were run on a T-maze with the high reward box on one side and the low reward on the other, it was found that the mean number of responses to the high reward side was significantly greater. "It was concluded that, where one secondary reinforcer is pitted against another, the amount of primary reward with which each derived reinforcer was previously correlated is an important variable determining the relative strength of the secondary reinforcers.".Keywords
This publication has 2 references indexed in Scilit:
- Transfer of secondary reinforcement across the hunger and thirst drives.Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1955
- Amount of primary reward and strength of secondary reward.Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1953