Punishment by Noise in an Alternative Response Situation¹

Operant responses of human subjects were conditioned according to a variable-interval schedule of positive reinforcement. A brief noise was delivered as punishment for each of the responses. The noise suppressed the punished responses more when an alternative unpunished response was concurrently available than when only a single punished response was available. This finding extends the generality of a previous study that had used a period of extinction rather than the brief noise as the punishing stimulus.