THE EFFECTS OF A VARIETY OF INSTRUCTIONS ON HUMAN FIXED-INTERVAL PERFORMANCE

College students were instructed to press a button for points under a single reinforcement schedule or under a variety of reinforcement schedules. Instructions for a single schedule were either specific or minimal. Instructions on a variety of schedules involved specific instructions on eight different schedules of reinforcement. Subsequent to the varied training, responding under a fixed‐interval schedule occurred at a low rate. Both the minimal and specific instruction training led to fixed‐interval responding that was similar to the responding exhibited during training. These findings suggest that under certain conditions instructed behavior is sensitive to changes in contingencies.