Abstract
Three groups of 11 rats each were reinforced with one, two, or three 45-mg food pellets for responses having peak forces which fell within a 10- to 15-g force band. Other recorded responses above the 4-g response threshold were not reinforced. Measures of force differentiation performance, such as standard deviation of peak force and proportion of responses in band, showed that rate of differentiation learning and precision of force emission achieved increased with increasing amounts of reinforcer. These results are consistent with previous descriptions of the relationship between amount of reinforcer and force emission.
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References
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This research was supported in part by the Committee on Faculty Research of the Graduate School of the University of Mississippi.
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Harrell, J.V., Fowler, S.C. Amount of reinforcer and differentiation of response force. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 10, 358–360 (1977). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03329359
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03329359