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Appetitive differential conditioning of the rabbit’s jaw movement response

Effects of cue similarity and US magnitude

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An Erratum to this article was published on 01 July 1986

Abstract

Two experiments examined appetitive differential conditioning of the rabbit’s jaw movement response (JMR) in a two-phase procedure. The first phase entailed reinforced training with one conditioned stimulus (CS+), and the second phase involved intermixed presentations of CS+ and an unreinforced stimulus (CS−). In Experiment 1, CS+ was a 600-Hz tone, and CS-was either a 660-,1,000-, or 2,100-Hz tone. In Experiment 2, the magnitude of the water unconditioned stimulus (US) paired with CS+ was either 1, 3, or 9 ml. The experiments revealed that 1) the level of responding to CS-rose for several days and then declined over the remainder of training; 2) the physical similarity between CS+ and CS−directly affected the level of responding to CS−but had no discernable effect on the level of responding to CS+ ; and 3) US magnitude positively affected the level of responding to CS + and, to a lesser extent, CS−. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for Spence’s gradient interaction theory and Pavlov’s external inhibition hypothesis.

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Author notes

  1. Constantine X. Poulos

    Present address: Addiction Research Foundation, University of Toronto, Canada

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of New South Wales, USA

    E. James Kehoe, Constantine X. Poulos & I. Gormezano

  2. University of Iowa, USA

    E. James Kehoe, Constantine X. Poulos & I. Gormezano

Authors
  1. E. James Kehoe
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  2. Constantine X. Poulos
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  3. I. Gormezano
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Additional information

Supported by NSF grant BNS 83-09826.

An erratum to this article is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF02699349.

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Kehoe, E.J., Poulos, C.X. & Gormezano, I. Appetitive differential conditioning of the rabbit’s jaw movement response. Pav. J. Biol. Sci. 20, 29–38 (1985). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03003236

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