Intertrial intervals and contextual conditioning in appetitive pavlovian learning: effects over the ABA renewal paradigm.

Three experiments using rats in an appetitive conditioning procedure analyzed the effect of short and long (50s vs. 1440s) intertrial intervals (ITI) over the acquisition of conditioned stimulus (CS), context (Ctxt), and unconditioned stimulus (US) associations, as well as the effect on the extinction and renewal of the conditioned response to the CS. Experiment 1 revealed more contextual conditioned responses in groups trained with the short ITIs, however the renewal effect was not observed during test phase with either ITI condition.

Differential effects of spaced vs. massed training in long-term object-identity and object-location recognition memory.

Here we tested whether the well-known superiority of spaced training over massed training is equally evident in both object identity and object location recognition memory. We trained animals with objects placed in a variable or in a fixed location to produce a location-independent object identity memory or a location-dependent object representation. The training consisted of 5 trials that occurred either on one day (Massed) or over the course of 5 consecutive days (Spaced).