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Time discrimination in infants:
the effects of impulses under FI schedules. Vinca Rivière Université de Lille, Ch. de Gaulle, France Children's performance on temporal tasks displays some of the dynamic effects observed in animals. Thus, infants trained on FI schedules adjust their postreinforcement pauses, or waiting times, to the intereinforcement interval. Furhermore, their waiting time changes rapidly when the interreinforcement interval changes. We used Higa's (1996) experimental procedure for studying rapid timing to identify some of the important factors in time discrimination. In experiment 1, a 40-s interreinforcement interval (impulse) was intercalated in a series of 20-s interreinforcement intervals (no impulse). We varied the number (2 or 8) and spacing (consecutive or far apart) of the impulse. Experiment 2 was similar except that the durations of the impulse and no impulse intervals equaled 5 s and 20 s, respectively. The results suggest that time discrimination can be understood in terms of interactions among the effects of interreifnrocement intervals and that the process is more complex than the 'one back' process or other forms of linear waiting. Keywords: time discrimination, fixed-interval schedules dynamics, interreinforcement interval, waiting time, infants |
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