EFFECTS OF STIMULUS FREQUENCY AND REINFORCEMENT VARIABLES ON REACTION TIME

Blough, Donald S. · 1992 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.1901/jeab.1992.57-47

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Summary

This study investigates the factors influencing reaction time in visual search tasks, specifically examining the roles of stimulus frequency and reinforcement variables. The research addresses the "repeated-exposure effect," where subjects locate frequently encountered targets more rapidly than rare ones. While this phenomenon is often attributed to attentional priming or perceptual readiness, the authors sought to determine if differential reinforcement history could account for these speed differences. By minimizing perceptual difficulty, the study aimed to isolate whether reaction times are driven by the frequency of target appearance, the probability of reinforcement, or the duration of reinforcement. The experiment utilized three male White Carneau pigeons trained to peck at one of two highly discriminable black forms ("+" or "o") displayed on a computer monitor. In baseline conditions, both targets appeared with equal frequency, and two pecks resulted in food reinforcement on 10% of trials. The experimental design varied the relative frequency of target appearance, the probability of reinforcement, and the duration of food presentation across multiple series of sessions. Reaction time was measured from target onset to the first peck. Statistical analyses, including mixed-model ANOVAs, compared reaction times during experimental series against baseline periods to assess the impact of these independent variables. The results demonstrated that reaction times were sensitive to the probability of reinforcement but insensitive to the relative frequency of target appearance or the duration of reinforcement. When the probability of reinforcement was equal for both targets, reaction times remained approximately equal, even when the frequency of appearance differed by a ratio of 19 to 1. Conversely, increasing the reinforcement probability for one target significantly increased reaction times for the other target, regardless of whether the total number of reinforcements was equated across targets. Doubling the duration of food presentation had no significant effect on reaction times for either target. These findings suggest that attentional priming is unimportant when targets are easy to detect, supporting the view that the repeated-exposure effect is primarily perceptual under conditions of high detectability. The study concludes that equalizing reinforcement probability per trial removes differential reinforcement as a confounding variable in visual search experiments. Furthermore, the dissociation between reaction time sensitivity to reinforcement probability versus duration contrasts with response rate measures, which are sensitive to both. This indicates that reaction time and response rate reflect different, though potentially overlapping, behavioral mechanisms.

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• perception reaction time