Wynne, C. D. L., Staddon, J. E. R., & Delius, J. D. (1996).
Dynamics of waiting in pigeons.
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior,
65, 603-618.
Two experiments used response-initiated delay schedules to test
the idea that when food reinforcement is available at regular
intervals, the time an animal waits before its first operant
response (waiting time) is proportional to the immediately
preceding interfood interval (linear waiting; Wynne &
Staddon, 1988). In Experiment 1 the interfood intervals varied
from cycle to cycle according to one of four sinusoidal sequences
with different amounts of added noise. Waiting times tracked the
input cycle in a way which showed that they were affected by
interfood intervals earlier than the immediately preceding one.
In Experiment 2 different patterns of long and short interfood
intervals were presented, and the results implied that waiting
times are disproportionately influenced by the shortest of recent
interfood intervals. A model based on this idea is shown to
account for a wide range of results on the dynamics of timing
behavior.
Key words: linear waiting, temporal discrimination, sequential
analysis, cyclic-interval schedules, response-initiated delay
schedules, key peck, pigeons