The role of homecage environmental stimuli in the facilitation of shock-motivated spatial discrimination learning in rat pups

✍ Scribed by James R. Misanin; Charles F. Hinderliter

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1989
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 764 KB
• Volume: 22
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0012-1630
• DOI: 10.1002/dev.420220204

✦ Synopsis

In three experiments we examined the role of homecage environmental stimuli on learning an aversively motivated spatial discrimination task in I I-day-old rats. Varying the presence and absence of nest shavings in the correct and incorrect arms of a T-maze in Experiment 1 revealed that nest shavings had both nondirective facilitation and approach-eliciting properties. Training the 1 I-day-old rats in the presence or absence of shavings over three daily sessions and comparing their performance on the third day of training with that of a maturation control in Experiment 2 indicated that there is a residual training effect of the approach-eliciting property of nest shavings on shock-escape behavior. In Experiment 3, using nest shavings either as an irrelevant stimulus or as a redundant relevant cue in an aversively motivated T-maze reversal task suggested that 1 I-day-old rats acquire the discrimination task using non-nest spatial or directional cues as well as those provided by nest shavings. Overall, these results suggest that nest shavings introduced into aversively motivated tasks create a learning environment comparable to that of appetitively motivated instrumental tasks utilizing suckling from an anesthetized dam as a reinforcer.

In the past decade several researchers have reported impressive appetitive learning capabilities in neonatal and infant rats, e.g.,