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Scopolamine effects on go-no go avoidance discriminations: influence of stimulus factors and primacy of training

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Abstract

Rats were trained in a shuttle-box to perform four go-no go avoidance discrimination tasks, with various combinations of active and passive avoidance signals: 1) light → go, noise-light → no go; 2) light → go, noise → no go; 3) noise → go, light-noise → no go; 4) noise → go, light → no go. The first task was learned with great average difficulty, and showed a large passive avoidance deficit after scopolamine treatment. The other tasks were much easier to learn, and scopolamine exerted little or no effect on their performance. However, relationships between task difficulty and sensitivity to drug were practically absent within groups.

After the completion of discrimination tests, active avoidance retraining was carried out with former passive avoidance cues. This was to obtain an indirect measure of possible differences in the amount of response suppression by these cues. Retraining with noise as CS showed identical acquisition rates in the groups which had previously performed with light as active avoidance signal, and either noise or noise-light as passive avoidance signal. Retraining with light as CS showed faster acquisition in the former “noise → go, light → no go” group, as compared with the former “noise → go, light-noise → no go” group.

An additional experiment showed that the elimination of active avoidance pretraining before discrimination training reduced the passive avoidance deficit and enhanced the active avoidance deficit provoked by scopolamine in the “light → go, noise-light → no go” task. In spite of such elimination of the primacy of training in favour of active responses, however, the passive avoidance deficit remained greater than the active avoidance deficit.

The relative merits of various neuropsychological interpretations of the effects of central antimuscarinic agents (reappearance of responses to biologically irrelevant stimuli, response disinhibition, set perseveration, amnesia, state-dependency) are discussed. The role of built-in hierarchies between stimulus-response relationships, and of response hierarchies (both innate and dependent on training history) are emphasized.

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  1. Department of Therapeutical Chemistry, Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Roma, Italia

    Nedeljko Rosić & Giorgio Bignami

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  1. Nedeljko Rosić
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  2. Giorgio Bignami
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On leave from the Department of Pharmacology of the Medical Faculty, Bul. JNA 18, Beograd (Yugoslavia).

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Rosić, N., Bignami, G. Scopolamine effects on go-no go avoidance discriminations: influence of stimulus factors and primacy of training. Psychopharmacologia 17, 203–215 (1970). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00402080

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