ArduiPod Box: A low-cost and open-source Skinner box using an iPod Touch and an Arduino microcontroller

This article introduces the ArduiPod Box, an open-source device built using two main components (i.e., an iPod Touch and an Arduino microcontroller), developed as a low-cost alternative to the standard operant conditioning chamber, or “Skinner box.” Because of its affordability, the ArduiPod Box provides an opportunity for educational institutions with small budgets seeking to set up animal laboratories for research and instructional purposes. A pilot experiment is also presented, which shows that the ArduiPod Box, in spite of its extraordinary simplicity, can be effectively used to study animal learning and behavior.     

A novel rotometer based on a RISC microcontroller

A new, low-cost rotometer, based on a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) microcontroller, is presented. Like earlier devices, it counts the number and direction of full turns for predetermined time periods during the evaluation of turning behavior induced by drug administration in rats. The present stand-alone system includes a nonvolatile memory for long-term data storage and a serial port for data transmission. It also contains a display for monitoring the experiments and has battery backup to avoid interruptions owing to power failures. A high correlation was found (r > .988,p < 2 × 10⁻¹⁴) between the counts of the rotometer and those of two trained observers. The system reflects quantitative differences in turning behavior owing to pharmacological manipulations. It provides the most common counting parameters and is inexpensive, flexible, highly reliable, and completely portable (weight including batteries, 159 g).     

Two open source designs for a low‐cost operant chamber using Raspberry Pi™

After almost a century of use and development, operant chambers remain a significant financial investment for scientists. Small powerful single‐board computers such as the Raspberry Pi? offer researchers a low‐cost alternative to expensive operant chambers. In this paper, we describe two new operant chambers, one using nose‐poke ports as operanda and another using a touchscreen. To validate the chamber designs, rats learned to perform both visual discrimination and delayed alternation tasks in each chamber. Designs and codes are open source and serve as a starting point for researchers to develop behavioral experiments or educational demonstrations.     

An inexpensive operant chamber interface for the VIC 20 microcomputer

An inexpensive interface to connect the VIC 20 (or other Commodore microcomputer) to a single operant chamber is described. This interface is equipped to accept as inputs three separate switch closures and produces five outputs, including one to elevate a food hopper. The uses of this interface for controlling experimental events and acquiring data in real time are discussed.     

Response cost and the aversive control of human operant behavior

The effects of cost (point-loss per response) upon human avoidance, escape, and avoidance-escape behavior maintained by PLPs (point-loss periods) were investigated. Cost had a marked but differentially suppressive effect upon responding under all schedules. The greatest number of PLPs taken under cost occurred on the escape schedule. In most instances PLPs were more frequent on the avoidance-escape schedule than on the avoidance schedule under cost. Inferior avoidance performance appeared only under cost conditions. Under no-cost, all subjects (Ss) successfully avoided all PLPs after the first hour of conditioning. These results indicate that the development and maintenance of human avoidance and escape behavior may, in part, be dependent upon response cost conditions. Aversive control of human operant behavior may be limited without an adequate specification of response-cost conditions.     

A novel contextual dimension for use with an operant chamber: from simple to hierarchical forms of learning

A novel procedure is described in which the floor temperatures (warm and cool) in an operant chamber are used as contextual cues in 2 experiments with rats. Experiment 1 demonstrated that rats learn the relationship between these thermal contexts and auditory stimuli that have been paired with them. Experiment 2 showed that thermal contexts can serve a conditional function that (a) reflects the operation of a mechanism that is common to conventional, visual contexts and (b) is bound to these contexts' ability to retrieve the nature of the relationship between the auditory stimuli and food.     

ELOPTA: A novel microcontroller-based operant device

Operant devices have been used for many years in animal behavior research, yet such devices a regenerally highly specialized and quite expensive. Although commercial models are somewhat adaptable and resilient, they are also extremely expensive and are controlled by difficult to learn proprietary software. As an alternative to commercial devices, we have designed and produced a fully functional, programmable operant device, using a PICmicro microcontroller (Microchip Technology, Inc.). The electronic operant testing apparatus (ELOPTA) is designed to deliver food when a study animal, in this case a bird, successfully depresses the correct sequence of illuminated keys. The device logs each keypress and can detect and log whenever a test animal i spositioned at the device. Data can be easily transferred to a computer and imported into any statistical analysis software. At about 3% the cost of a commercial device, ELOPTA will advance behavioral sciences, including behavioral ecology, animal learning and cognition, and ethology.     

A nonsequential approach to the study of operant renewal: a reverse translation

ABA renewal is a model of treatment relapse that describes the recurrence of severe problem behavior when behavior learned in one context (e.g., home; A) and treated in a separate context (e.g., clinic; B) reemerges when the original context is reintroduced (A). However, in the typical environment and during the usual course of treatment for severe problem behavior, the target behavior is exposed to the baseline context periodically (e.g., the child returns home after several hours in a clinic setting). Due to the difficulty of studying what effect this may have on treatment relapse during ABA renewal in a strictly applied investigation, we developed a human‐laboratory translation to study renewal in a nonsequential manner. Using undergraduate students as subjects, we directly compared levels of recurrence using the standard ABA renewal procedure and a modified nonsequential ACA procedure, one modeled from the typical course of treatment for problem behavior. Both methods produced renewal at comparable levels, and patterns during nonsequential ACA renewal were similar to those during sequential ABA renewal. We discuss the implications of these findings in the framework of treatment for severe problem behavior.     

Pigeons' performance under differential reinforcement of low rate schedules depends upon the operant

Pigeons were reinforced with grain for pecking a key or depressing a foot treadle according to differential reinforcement of low rate (DRL) schedules. Birds which depressed a treadle performed efficiently on DRL schedules as high as DRL 35-sec; while birds reinforced for keypecking showed low efficiency under DRL 14-sec. While treadle pressing and keypecking differ along a number of dimensions (including force requirement of the operant and differences in temporal distributions of responses), the present results are consistent with an interpretation based on differences in the degree to which these two responses are elicited by periodic presentations of food.     

Effects of operant conditioning on the GSR

Each of nine Ss was run for 11 daily sessions. Except for the first (operant level) and last two (extinction) sessions, 500-ohm drops in skin resistance were followed by reinforcement (light). These reinforcement periods lasted 20 min and were preceded by 10-min control periods during which no reinforcement was administered. Although the results showed no evidence for operant conditioning of the GSR, they did indicate that increased emission of GSR's occurred during the reinforcement period. This effect was shown to hold for Ss with low operant levels of GSR's but not for Ss with high operant levels.     

The lickometer: A simple device for the analysis of licking as an operant

A lickometer for recording dry (unreinforced) tube licking in rats is described. As opposed to the conventional drinkometer, where each lick produces fluid, the lickometer provides the possibility for automatically programmed intermittent reinforcement of (dry) licking, and it does not involve electrical connections through the chamber floor. Comparison of licking and leverpressing with equivalent reinforcers and under equivalent schedules of reinforcement is thus feasible.     

Psycholinguistics discovers the operant: a review of Roger Brown's A first language: the early stages

Brown's book is selectively reviewed with the aim of noting points of similarity between Brown's psycholinguistic analysis of language acquisition and a functional analysis of verbal behavior. Brown divides early language acquisition into five stages, based on mean length of utterance in samples of child speech. His book concentrates on Stage I, when mean length of utterance first rises above 1.0, indicating that children are beginning to speak in multi-morphemic utterances, and Stage II, when mean length of utterance in morphemes is about 2.25. Multi-morphemic utterances in Stage I consist mainly of ordered sequences of uninflected nouns and verbs, the order being that of the simple declarative sentence (agent-action-indirect object-direct object-locative). The review attempts a theoretical analysis of the functional stimulus control of Stage I syntactic order, concluding that the control must originate partly in relations among events in the environment and partly in covert autoclitic verbal behavior. Increases in mean length of utterance in Stage II are mainly due to the appearance of several “grammatical morphemes” such as the progressive -ing inflection on verbs and the plural -s inflection on nouns. The review attempts a behavioral paraphrase, again in terms of tacts and autoclitics, of Brown's psycholinguistic analysis of grammatical morphemes, concluding that Stage II displays the further development, building on Stage I, of the combined control of verbal behavior by relations in the environment and covert self-generated verbal stimuli. Similarities between Brown's psycholinguistic analysis and a functional analysis of language acquisition suggest that the two viewpoints are converging on a common concern with the stimulus control of verbal behavior.     

A Commodore 64-based interface system for the operant laboratory

A system of interfaces for the Commodore 64 (C-64) microcomputer for use in the operant laboratory is described. This system frees the experimenter from limitations on the number of I/O lines available on the user port of the C-64 and offers the control of operant chambers for a low cost. Subroutines in machine code to control the interfaces, offering millisecond timing of external events, are presented. A sample BASIC program demonstrates how the subroutines are called from BASIC to run a simple discrimination experiment.