Sensory Contingent Bar Pressing For Various Combinations Of Sensory Change: The Effect Of Reinforcement Variability

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Abstract
The reported experiment was designed to study the effects of reinforcement variability on sensory‐contingent bar pressing (SCBP) in rats. Sound and/or light change was the reinforcer and variability was obtained by varying the sensory change from one response to another. Five different kinds of variability were studied (e.g. random versus regular variations in the reinforcer) and these were compared with three treatments involving no variability and an operant control treatment. No systematic or consistent relationship between SCBP and reinforcement variability was found. The fact that sound change took several trials before it became significantly reinforcing may have confounded a possible effect for variability. Finally, light and sound change combined as a contemporaneous change was not significantly more reinforcing than either light or sound change alone.