Reinforcing and timing properties of water in the schedule-induced drinking situation

• Access to water has motivational properties in the schedule-induced drinking task.
• Food can establish stimuli as conditioned reinforcers of schedule-induced drinking.
• Possibility to engage in schedule-induced drinking favors the choice of alternatives.
• Schedule-induced drinking facilitates temporal performance.
• Schedule-induced drinking and other adjunctive behaviors are reinforced by food.

A series of recent studies from our laboratory have added to the preceding literature on the potential role of water (in addition to food) as a positive reinforcer in the schedule-induced drinking situation, thus suggesting that adjunctive behaviors might have motivational properties that make their engagement a preferable alternative. It has also been suggested that adjunctive behaviors serve as a behavioral clock that helps organisms to estimate time, making their engagement motivational, so that they enable more accurate time adjustment under temporal schedules. Here, we review some of these experiments on conditioned reinforcement and concurrent chains, as well as on temporal learning. Data presented in this article suggest that adjunctive behaviors may be a part of the behavior patterns maintained by reinforcement, thus serving towards a better performance in temporal tasks.