Describing naturally occurring schedules: analysis of feedback functions for shooting during basketball games.

• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/d20003003

A number of recent studies have applied the matching law in analyzing behavior occurring in the context of sports including two- and three-point shot allocation by basketball players. This research contributes to our understanding of matching in that it suggests that the matching law may describe responding in naturally occurring human environments. However, because there is no experimental manipulation, the schedule in effect is unknown and it is unclear if obtained matching is a behavioral phenomenon (i.e., behavior conforming to relative reinforcement rates) or merely a relation between responding and reinforcement forced by ratio-like properties of the schedule. In the Study 1, both linear and hyperbolic feedback functions described the naturally occurring basketball shooting data; however data fell along a line which suggests responding was on a ratio schedule. In Study 2, an experiment was conducted in which the rate of basketball shooting was explicitly manipulated to generate a wider range of shooting rates than those observed in Study 1. For five of seven participants both equations described the data equally well and data fell along a linear path. For two participants the hyperbolic function more accurately described the data. Implications of these results for future descriptive analyses are discussed.