Adjunctive Behavior

Adjunctive behavior is a repeated behavior that is engaged in voluntarily as an adjunct to a temporally controlled, conditioned behavior. For instance, in one experiment it was noted that rats, when engaged in an experiment where they were rewarded with a food pellet for pressing a lever, but the reward was only delivered once per minute. It was noted that these rats would substitute drinking water while waiting for the food pellet reward to be delivered. However, this behavior substitution created a situation where the rats would ultimately drinking water way beyond their physical needs..