Marilia Pinheiro de Carvalho

University of Aveiro | UA · Department of Education and Psychology | William James Center for Research

In the study of animal timing over the last 100 years, we identify three different periods, each characterized by a distinct activity. In the first period, researchers brought timing into the laboratory and explored its multiple expressions empirically. In the second period, the growing body of empirical findings inspired researchers to develop a p...

A capuchin monkey will accept a preferred food in exchange for tokens if a conspecific also exchanges tokens for the preferred food; but he will reject a less-preferred food if the conspecific exchanges tokens for preferred food. These rejections are usually interpreted as a case of an inequity aversion based on a precursor of a sense of justice. A...

Simple and conditional discrimination training may produce various types of controlling relations. Responses may be controlled primarily by the positive stimulus (select–control relation) or by the negative stimulus (reject–control relation; the subject excludes the negative stimulus and chooses the positive). Bees learn to respond in simple and co...

In relatively simple choice tasks, some animals seem to behave irrationally by making suboptimal choices. Zentall (2019) suggests that these animals may choose according to a variety of heuristics that are adaptive in their natural environments but maladaptive in the contrived laboratory settings. We argue that Zentall’s specific heuristics range f...

We examined whether temporal context influences how animals produce a time interval. Six pigeons pecked one key to start an interval and then another key to end the interval. Reinforcement followed whenever the interval duration fell within a range of values signaled by the keylight colors. During Phase 1, keylight colors S1 and L1, intermixed acro...

Inspired by Spence's seminal work on transposition, we propose a synthetic approach to understanding the temporal control of operant behavior. The approach takes as primitives the temporal generalization gradients obtained in prototypical concurrent and retrospective timing tasks and then combines them to synthetize more complex temporal performanc...

We examined whether temporal learning in a bisection task is absolute or relational. Eight pigeons learned to choose a red key after a t-seconds sample and a green key after a 3t-seconds sample. To determine whether they had learned a relative mapping (short→Red, long→Green) or an absolute mapping (t-seconds→Red, 3t-seconds→Green), the pigeons then...

The present study investigated racial attitudes among children by means of the equivalence class paradigm. Four children that, during a pre-test with a matching-to- sample task associated negative symbols with the faces of black men, participated in the study. During training, the children learned to associate positive symbols with an abstract symb...

Resumo Desde o início do século XX que a psicologia se tem interessado pelo estudo experimental da regula-ção temporal do comportamento, mas esta área de pesquisa, conhecida como timing, só se consolidou a partir da década de 1960. Desde então, vários procedimentos utilizados com sujeitos de diferentes espécies têm permitido identifi car as caracte...

The relative-coding hypothesis of temporal discrimination asserts that humans learn to respond to the relative duration of stimuli ("short" and "long"). The most frequently used procedure to test the hypothesis is the double bisection task. In one task, participants learn that red and green are the correct comparisons following 2-s (short) and 5-s...

When subjects learn to associate two sample durations with two comparison keys, do they learn to associate the keys with the short and long samples (relational hypothesis), or with the specific sample durations (absolute hypothesis)? We exposed 16 pigeons to an ABA design in which phases A and B corresponded to tasks using samples of 1 s and 4 s, o...

Behavioral analysts have used the equivalence class paradigm to investigate and explain the processes involved in the formation and modification of social attitudes. From this perspective, attitudes are defined as equivalence classes established between social groups and certain attributes, with the classes specifying the psychological function of...