Gamzu & Schwartz: Maintenance of Key Pecking

Question 1

Purpose

Answer 1

Study the importance of stimulus-food contingency to the maintenance of key pecking by response-independent food presentation

Question 2

Procedure

Answer 2

3 naïve pigeons were exposed to a series of multiple schedules of response-independent food presentation.

Each daily session consisted of 80, 27-sec components, alternating between green and red illumination of center key

Question 3

Results

Answer 3

Results support Staddon & Simmelhag’s theory: delivery of food to a hungry pigeon engenders pecking

Response key becomes target of peck because the key stimulus is differential signal for food presentation

When the effectiveness of the key stimulus is eliminated (non-differential procedure) key pecking (though not necessarily pecking) declines.

Results suggest that the necessary conditions under which a key stimulus will induce pecking in the naïve pigeon are those in which the stimulus in question is differentially associated with a higher frequency of food presentations than obtains in the absence of that stimulus.