Vasconcelos, M. & Urcuioli, P.J. (2009).
Extensive training is insufficient to produce the work-ethic effect in pigeons.
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 91, 143-152.
Zentall and Singer (2007a) hypothesized that our failure to replicate the work-ethic effect in pigeons (Vasconcelos, Urcuioli, & Lionello-DeNolf,
2007) was due to insufficient overtraining following acquisition of the high- and low-effort discriminations. We tested this hypothesis using the
original work-ethic procedure (Experiment 1) and one similar to that used with starlings (Experiment 2) by providing at least 60 overtraining
sessions. Despite this extensive overtraining, neither experiment revealed a significant preference for stimuli obtained after high effort.
Together with other findings, these data support our contention that pigeons do not reliably show a work-ethic effect.
Key words: work ethic, effort, within-trial contrast, overtraining, key peck, pigeons