On the role of trial outcomes in delayed discriminations

Abstract

Delayed simple discriminations are typically retained more accurately over longer delays by pigeons than are delayed conditional discriminations (e.g., Honig & Wasserman, 1981). In two experiments, we investigated the extent to which trial outcomes contribute to this difference by comparing performances when all trials ended with food reinforcement versus when only half of the trials did. Experiment 1 showed that when food was presented on all trials, contingent upon either pecking or not pecking the test stimulus, levels of retention and rates of forgetting were comparable for these two tasks. By contrast, Experiment 2 showed better retention of delayed simple than delayed conditional discriminations when half of the trials ended with food and the other half in extinction. Furthermore, delayed simple discriminations were retained more accurately with food versus no-food outcomes than with food at the end of every trial, whereas the reverse was true for delayed conditional discriminations. These findings indicate that retention differences between these tasks are another instance of the differential outcomes effect. © 1990 Psychonomic Society, Inc.