Temporal tracking on cyclic-interval reinforcement schedules.

Pigeons were exposed to four cycles per session of a schedule in which the duration of successive interreinforcement intervals differed by t-sec. A cycle was composed of seven increasing and seven decreasing intervals, from 2t to 8t sec in length. In Exp. 1, postreinforcement pause tracked interval duration on five cyclic schedules, with values of t ranging from 2 to 40 sec. Tracking was better at shorter t values, and when discriminative stimuli signalled increasing and decreasing parts of the cycle. Pooled data for the whole experiment showed postreinforcement pause to bear a power function relationship to interval length, with a smaller exponent than the comparable function for fixed-interval schedules. Tests in a second experiment showed that pigeons trained on an arithmetic progression could also track schedules in which successive intervals followed either a logarithmic or a geometric progression, although tracking was more stable in the logarithmic case.