Effects of Reinforcement Schedules on Discriminative Responding (*N)

Abstract

A detailed account of the relations between rate of reinforcement and responding in concurrent VI schedules has been given by Catania (1963a). While these relations are different in the case of multiple schedules (cf. Reynolds, 1963), this thesis suggests that they are of the same form and differ only quantitatively from the relations found in concurrent schedules. A general equation is derived to provide a unitary quantitative description of these relations in multi-component schedules. This suggests that differences in these relations between schedules may be specified in terms of a single parameter of the equation which is related to the magnitude of inter-actions between components.