J Exp Anal Behav
January 2024
Operant behavior can reflect the influence of goal-directed and habitual processes. These can be distinguished by changes to response rate following devaluation of the reinforcing outcome. Whether a response is goal directed or habitual depends on whether devaluation affects response rate.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFew studies have considered how signal detection parameters evolve during acquisition periods. We addressed this gap by training mice with differential prior experience in a conditional discrimination, auditory signal detection task. Naïve mice, mice given separate experience with each of the later correct choice options (Correct Choice Response Transfer, CCRT), and mice experienced in conditional discriminations (Conditional Discrimination Transfer, CDT) were trained to detect the presence or absence of a tone in white noise.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Exp Psychol Anim Learn Cogn
October 2022
Negative patterning tasks are a key tool to unveil the mechanisms by which stimulus representations are acquired-a central concern in Robert Rescorla's research. In these tasks, target stimuli are reinforced when presented individually (A+/B+) but not when presented in compound (AB-). The discrimination of single stimuli from their compound presentation is a challenge for theories of associative learning, because it cannot be explained by the simple accrual of associative strength.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany developmental syndromes have been linked to genetic mutations that cause abnormal ERK/MAPK activity; however, the neuropathological effects of hyperactive signaling are not fully understood. Here, we examined whether hyperactivation of MEK1 modifies the development of GABAergic cortical interneurons (CINs), a heterogeneous population of inhibitory neurons necessary for cortical function. We show that GABAergic-neuron specific MEK1 hyperactivation in vivo leads to increased cleaved caspase-3 labeling in a subpopulation of immature neurons in the embryonic subpallial mantle zone.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe behavior systems framework suggests that motivated behavior-e.g., seeking food and mates, avoiding predators-consists of sequences of actions organized within nested behavioral states.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study investigated the role of the dorsal hippocampus (dHPC) in the temporal entrainment of behavior, while addressing limitations of previous evidence from peak procedure experiments. Rats were first trained on a switch-timing task in which food was obtained from one of two concurrently available levers; one lever was effective after 8 s and the other after 16 s. After performance stabilized, rats underwent either bilateral NMDA lesions of the dHPC or sham lesions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFParadoxical choices in human and nonhuman animals represent substantial deviations from rational models of behavior; such deviations often demand models that incorporate multiple perspectives, including psychology, biology, and economics. The past couple of decades have seen an increased interest in the paradoxical choice of pigeons in 2-armed bandit tasks (2ABT) developed by Zentall and colleagues. In these 2ABTs, pigeons, but not rats, systematically choose an alternative that yields less reward over multiple trials but provides more information on events within a trial, over an alternative that yields more reward over trials but provides less information on events within a trial.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA common assumption in the study of fixed-interval (FI) timing is that FI performance is largely stable within sessions, once it is stable between sessions. Within-session changes in FI performance were examined in published data (Daniels and Sanabria, 2017), wherein some rats were trained on a FI 30-s schedule of food reinforcement (FI30) and others on a FI 90-s schedule (FI90). Following stability, FI90 rats were pre-fed for five sessions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRationale: Prolonged use of nicotine appears to enhance incentive salience, a motivational-cognitive process that transforms an otherwise neutral stimulus into a "wanted" stimulus. It has been suggested that nicotinic enhancement of incentive salience contributes to the potential of relapse in individuals with tobacco addiction. However, there are two main limitations of prior research that caution this claim: (a) the use of passive experimentally delivered nicotine and (b) the use of sign-tracking as an index of incentive salience, without acknowledging the competing nature of goal- and sign-tracking responses.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe present study examined how systemic low doses of nicotine affect the microstructure of reinforced food-seeking behavior in rats. Rats were first given an acute saline or nicotine treatment (0.1-0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Exp Psychol Anim Learn Cogn
July 2017
According to the biexponential refractory model (BERM) of variable-interval (VI) performance, operant behavior is organized in bouts, described by 3 dissociable components: between-bout interresponse times (IRTs), within-bout IRTs, and bout lengths. Research has shown that between-bout IRTs are sensitive to changes in rate of reinforcement and reinforcer efficacy, the length of some bouts is selectively sensitive to changes in response-reinforcer contingencies, and within-bout IRTs are relatively insensitive to both manipulations. BERM assumes that within- and between-bout IRTs are exponentially distributed, and bout lengths are described by a mixture of negative binomial and geometric distributions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSchedule-induced polydipsia (SIP) was established in spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR), Wistar Kyoto rats (WKY), and Wistar rats, using a multiple fixed-time (FT) schedule of food delivery, with 30- and 90-s components. Thereafter, animals were exposed to methylphenidate (MPH; 2.5mg/kg/d) for six consecutive SIP sessions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere is evidence that impulsive decision-making is associated with errors in timing. However, there has been little attempt to identify the putative mechanism responsible for impulsive animals' timing errors. One means of manipulating impulsivity in non-human animals is providing different levels of access to conspecifics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe distribution of latencies and interresponse times (IRTs) of rats was compared between two fixed-interval (FI) schedules of food reinforcement (FI 30 s and FI 90 s), and between two levels of food deprivation. Computational modeling revealed that latencies and IRTs were well described by mixture probability distributions embodying two-state Markov chains. Analysis of these models revealed that only a subset of latencies is sensitive to the periodicity of reinforcement, and prefeeding only reduces the size of this subset.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAttention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a risk factor for tobacco use and dependence. This study examines the responsiveness to nicotine of an adolescent model of ADHD, the spontaneously hypertensive rat (SHR). The conditioned place preference (CPP) procedure was used to assess nicotine-induced locomotion and conditioned reward in SHR and the Wistar Kyoto (WKY) control strain over a range of nicotine doses (0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper reviews the evidence for nicotine-induced acceleration of the internal clock when timing in the seconds-to-minutes timescale, and proposes an alternative explanation to this evidence: that nicotine reduces the threshold for responses that result in more reinforcement. These two hypotheses were tested in male Wistar rats using a novel timing task. In this task, rats were trained to seek food at one location after 8s since trial onset and at a different location after 16s.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhen humans are asked to judge the value of a set of objects of excellent quality, they often give this set higher value than those same objects with the addition of some of lesser quality. This is an example of the affect heuristic, often referred to as the less-is-more effect. Monkeys and dogs, too, have shown this suboptimal effect.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn studies of transitive inference (TI), nonhuman animals are typically trained with the following 5-term task: A+B-, B+C-, C+D-, D+E- where the letters stand for arbitrary stimuli and [+] indicates that choice is reinforced and [-] indicates that choice is not reinforced. A TI effect is found when, given the untrained test pair BD, subjects choose B. TI effects have been found in many nonhuman species.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn nonhuman animals, the transitive inference (TI) task typically involves training a series of four simultaneous discriminations involving, for example, arbitrary colors in which choice of one stimulus in each pair is reinforced [+] and choice of the other color is nonreinforced [-]. This can be represented as A+B-, B+C-, C+D-, D+E- and can be conceptualized as a series of linear relationships: A > B > C > D > E. After training, animals are tested on the untrained non-endpoint pair, BD.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Exp Psychol Anim Learn Cogn
January 2014
Pigeons prefer a low-probability, high-payoff but suboptimal alternative over a reliable low-payoff optimal alternative (i.e., one that results in more food).
View Article and Find Full Text PDF