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Operant behavior can reflect the influence of goal‐directed and habitual processes. These can be distinguished by changes to response rate following devaluation of the reinforcing outcome. Whether a response is goal directed or habitual depends on whether devaluation affects response rate. Response rate can be decomposed into frequencies of bouts and pauses by analyzing the distribution of interresponse times. This study sought to characterize goal‐directed and habitual behaviors in terms of bout‐initiation rate, within‐bout response rate, bout length, and bout duration. Data were taken from three published studies that compared sensitivity to devaluation following brief and extended training with variable‐interval schedules. Analyses focused on goal‐directed and habitual responding, a comparison of a habitual response to a similarly trained response that had been converted back to goal‐directed status after a surprising event, and a demonstration of contextual control of habit and goal direction in the same subjects. Across experiments and despite responses being clearly distinguished as goal directed and habitual by total response rate, analyses of bout‐initiation rate, within‐bout rate, bout length, and bout duration did not reveal a pattern that distinguished goal‐directed from habitual responding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In nonhuman animals, the transitive inference (TI) task typically involves training a series of four simultaneous discriminations involving, for example, arbitrary colors in which choice of one stimulus in each pair is reinforced [+] and choice of the other color is nonreinforced [−]. This can be represented as A+B−, B+C−, C+D−, D+E− and can be conceptualized as a series of linear relationships: A > B > C > D > E. After training, animals are tested on the untrained non-endpoint pair, BD. Preference for B over D is taken as evidence of TI and occurs because B is greater than D in the implied series. In the present study we trained pigeons using a novel training procedure-a hybrid of successive pair training (training one pair at a time) and mixed-pair training (training all pairs at once)-designed to overcome some of the limitations of earlier procedures. Using this hybrid procedure, we trained five premise pairs (A+B−, B+C−, C+D−, D+E−, and E+F−) which allowed us to test three untrained non-endpoint pairs (BD, CE, and BE). A significant TI effect was found for most subjects on at least two out of three test pairs. Different theories of TI are discussed. The results suggest that this hybrid training is an efficient procedure for establishing mixed-pair acquisition and a TI effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]