The allocation of time to temporally defined behaviors: responding during stimulus generalization.
In one stimulus condition, reinforcement depended on rats holding a lever for a duration having both minimum and maximum boundaries. During a second light intensity, reinforcement was not available for some rats; for others, reinforcement depended on a second response duration requirement. Generalization test stimuli controlled the same response durations found during training, and the amount of time allocated to a given response duration depended on the proximity of the test stimulus to the training stimulus which controlled that particular duration. The results indicated that a gradient of stimulus control does not reflect an underlying continuous change in responding, but is a result of the mixing of responses previously controlled by stimuli present during conditioning.
D000818:Animals; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005795:Generalization, Stimulus; D051381:Rats; D012055:Reinforcement Schedule; D013998:Time Perception