Second-order schedules with paired auditory brief stimuli.

Pigeons were exposed to multiple second-order schedules of paired and unpaired brief stimuli in which responding on the main key was reinforced according to a fixed-interval thirty-second schedule by a brief stimulus (a tone in the paired schedule) and advancement to the next segment of the second-order schedule. In Experiment 1, a response on the second key was required during the tone in its fourth and final presentation to produce food. Responses during earlier brief stimuli indicated the extent to which the final brief stimulus was discriminated from preceding ones. Responding was comparable during all tones, extending prior findings with visual paired brief stimuli and weakening explanations of subjects' failure to discriminate between brief-stimulus presentations in terms of elicited responding. In Experiment 2 the number of fixed-interval segments comprising the second-order schedules varied from one through eight. Although main-key response rates increased across segments in both experiments, they increased much less sharply with a variable number of segments. These results suggest that the increase in main-key response rates across segments is due primarily to a degree of temporal discrimination not reflected on the second key. Main-key response rates were higher on paired auditory brief-stimulus schedules than on unpaired visual brief-stimulus schedules, especially in Experiment 2, thus further extending findings with visual brief stimuli to second-order schedules with auditory brief stimuli.