Abstract
Four groups of rats were exposed to response-contingent, yoked noncontingent, or en masse food deliveries in a Skinner box or to no experimental pretreatment. All groups were subsequently tested for transfer of the learned-helplessness effect to an appetitive discrete-trial T-maze discrimination employing experimenter-blind procedures. The yoked group showed retarded discrimination learning in comparison with the response-contingent and naive control groups but not in comparison with the en masse control group. This nonsignificant difference between the yoked group and the en masse group may reflect the effect of limited exposure to uncontrollability in the en masse group. The groups did not differ in terms of the speed of maze traversal. The latter result suggests that the learned-helplessness effect observed in discrimination was not due to a competing response.
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Job, R.F.S. Learned helplessness in an appetitive discrete-trial T-maze discrimination test. Animal Learning & Behavior 15, 342–346 (1987). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03205029
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03205029