Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Testing The Functional Equivalence Of Retention Intervals And Sample-Stimulus Disparity In Conditional Discrimination, Ryan Ward

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Memory-trace theories of remembering suggest that performance in delayed matching-to-sample (DMTS) procedures depends on a memory trace that degrades with time. By contrast, the theory of direct remembering suggests that increasing the delay between sample and comparison stimuli in DMTS procedures is functionally equivalent to decreasing the disparity between sample stimuli. The present dissertation tested this assumption by assessing the degree to which changes in the frequency of reinforcement for correct choices biased the distribution of choice responses in a conditional-discrimination procedure. Seven pigeons responded under a temporal-discrimination procedure in which temporal sample-stimuli were categorized as being of either short …