Autoshaping

Autoshaping, also called sign tracking, is a classical conditioning procedure in which an animal comes to respond to a stimulus that reliably predicts a reward, even though the reward is delivered automatically and does not depend on the animal's behavior. Brown and Jenkins demonstrated the effect in 1968 by showing that pigeons would peck at an illuminated key that preceded food, despite pecking having no effect on whether food arrived. The finding challenged simple reinforcement accounts of learning, since animals kept responding to the predictive stimulus itself under conditions where responding could not increase the reward.