Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.

Imagine that! Cue-evoked representations guide rat behavior during ambiguous situations.
Mental imagery involves the perceptual-like experience of an event that is not physically present, or detected by the senses. Fast and Blaisdell (2011) reported that rats use the representation of an associatively retrieved event to guide behavior in ambiguous situations. Rats were reinforced for lever-pressing during 1 of 2 lights but not both lights. They were then tested with 1 light illuminated while the second light was either covered by an opaque shield (ambiguous) or uncovered and unlit (explicitly absent). Rats lever-pressed less when the second light was covered compared with unlit, suggesting that a representatio...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - February 14, 2016 Category: Zoology Authors: Fast, Cynthia D.; Biedermann, Traci; Blaisdell, Aaron P. Source Type: research

Learning about the CS during latent inhibition: Preexposure enhances temporal control.
In 3 experiments, rats were given nonreinforced preexposure to an auditory stimulus, after which this stimulus and a second, novel cue were paired with food. Lower rates of conditioned responding were observed to the preexposed stimulus across the 3 experiments, indicative of latent inhibition. The degree to which animals used these cues to time the occurrence of food delivery was also examined. Paradoxically, the response slopes—indicating the rate of increase in responding over the course of the conditioned stimulus—were greater for the preexposed than for the novel cues, consistent with the suggestion that the preex...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - February 14, 2016 Category: Zoology Authors: Bonardi, Charlotte; Brilot, Ben; Jennings, Dómhnall J. Source Type: research

Delay discounting: Pigeon, rat, human—does it matter?
Delay discounting refers to the decrease in subjective value of an outcome as the time to its receipt increases. Across species and situations, animals discount delayed rewards, and their discounting is well-described by a hyperboloid function. The current review begins with a comparison of discounting models and the procedures used to assess delay discounting in nonhuman animals. We next discuss the generality of discounting, reviewing the effects of different variables on the degree of discounting delayed reinforcers by nonhuman animals. Despite the many similarities in discounting observed between human and nonhuman ani...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - February 14, 2016 Category: Zoology Authors: Vanderveldt, Ariana; Oliveira, Luís; Green, Leonard Source Type: research

A stimulus-location effect in contingency-governed, but not rule-based, discrimination learning.
We tested pigeons’ acquisition of a conditional discrimination task between colored grating stimuli that included choosing 1 of 2 response keys, which either appeared as white keys to the left and right of the discriminative stimulus, or were replicas of the stimulus. Pigeons failed to acquire the discrimination when the response keys were white disks but succeeded when directly responding to a replica of the stimulus. These results highlight how conditioning processes shape learning in pigeons: The results can be accounted for by supposing that, when pigeons were allowed to respond directly toward the stimulus, learning...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - February 10, 2016 Category: Zoology Authors: Meier, Christina; Lea, Stephen E. G.; McLaren, Ian P. L. Source Type: research

Mediated overshadowing and potentiation of long-delay taste aversion learning: Two versus six cue-taste pairings.
This study tested whether such an effect can be found in long-delay taste aversion learning. The general methodology was to pair a cue with a sour taste (hydrochloric acid [HCl]) and then introduce the cue during the delay between the target taste, sucrose, and injection with lithium chloride (LiCl). Either 2 or 6 cue–HCl pairings were given. In Experiment 1, introduction of the cue, an almond flavor, produced overshadowing of the sucrose aversion in the group given 2 cue–HCl pairings (Paired-2), relative to an unpaired control, but potentiation of the sucrose aversion in the group given 6 cue-HCl pairings (Paired-6). ...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - January 11, 2016 Category: Zoology Authors: Kwok, Dorothy W. S.; Sun, Qian; Boakes, Robert A. Source Type: research