Superstitious Conditioning: A Replication and Extension of Neuringer (1970)

After immediate, response-dependent reinforcers were delivered for the first three key pecks made by experimentally naive pigeons, a variable-time schedule of response-independent reinforcement maintained key pecking. This result also was reported by Neuringer (1970). A stimulus change did not follow any key peck, and as a result the experiment demonstrated that response maintenance was not due to conditioned reinforcing effects of a light flash that was produced by each key peck in Neuringer’s experiment. An analysis of the temporal relation between responses and response-independent reinforcers showed that absolute temporal contiguity rarely, if ever, occurred. The data further suggest that any appeal to adventitious temporal contiguity in accounts of superstitious conditioning must be refined to include specification of actual temporal response-reinforcer relations and a modified definition of “contiguous.”