Effects of response-produced stimuli upon conditional discrimination performance.

In zero-delay matching procedures the performance of three groups of pigeons was examined when exteroceptive stimuli, response-produced stimuli associated with the completion of either of two fixed ratios, or a compound of exteroceptive and response-produced stimuli were available as samples. Exteroceptive samples were found to control a higher level of matching accuracy than response-produced samples, while compound samples controlled a higher level of accuracy than did exteroceptive samples alone. When all subjects were placed on a transfer procedure, during which the previously used red and green samples were replaced by horizontal and vertical lines, the availability of sample-specific fixed-ratios facilitated acquisition of the task.