Just as humans have a circadian rhythm that can be changed when entering a new time zone or season, other animals also exhibit time behavior - especially for food collection. As an animal’s environment changes over time, the they have to evolve to constantly change their time intervals for when they collect their food. This is very common in nectarivorous animals such as honeybees or bats. For example, honeybees know when to go out of their hive and obtain nectar from flowers because they have adapted to learn at what times a flower will “re-fill” its nectar.
To study these timing behaviors in animals, Fixed Interval (FI) procedures are used. In a FI procedure, first animals train until they become familiar with a FI interval that is set specifically for the experiment. After the animal has established a stable reaction to the set FI interval, the actual experiment begins. During the experiment, animals are rewarded if they perform a specific task at the set FI interval. If the animal takes the reward, the trial is labeled as a rewarded trial. However, if the animal fails to perform the task in the fixed time interval, the trial is labeled as an empty trial. When the whole experiment is graphed, the rewarded trials are interspersed with the empty trials to show an oscillation from the peak FI time that was set before the experiment began. Based on earlier studies that were done, a law on animal timing behavior was set called Weber’s Law. This law states that with increasing Fixed Interval time, the distribution of the response trials when graphed around the peak time widened proportionally to the increase in FI duration. The spread of the distribution around the FI time is hypothetically caused by a break-run-break pattern. Rese...
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Number of trials
Differed based on the the three fixed interval times. Experiment lasted for 12H for 7 days.
Sample size
18 echo-locating bats of the species Glossophaga soricina
DV
The DV was the responses of the bats according to the FI. There were two feeders in a cage that opened at specific times. There was the trigger feeder which opened first and it started the experiment. After 3s, 11s, or 20s, which were the three FIs, the peak beaker opened after the FI had elapsed and until FI*1.5. If the bat collected it's food during that time, it was recorded as a rewarded trial. If not, the response was recorded as an empty trial which was graphed away from the peak FI showing an oscillation in response times.
IV
The IV that was manipulated was the Fixed Interval time. It was manipulated by having three experiments for the 3s FI, 11s FI, and 20s FI