Abstract
Rats were trained and tested on delayed conditional discriminations (DCDs) consisting of four possible light and tone stimulus sequences: light-light, tone-tone, light-tone, and tone-light. A lever was presented after the offset of the second or test stimulus, S2. Two retention intervals (RIs) were present within the DCD task, one (RI-1) between the sample or first stimulus (S1) and S2, and the other (RI-2) between S2 and presentation of the lever. Liquid reinforcement was contingent upon pressing only when S2 matched S1 in Experiment 1 or only when S2 differed from S1 in Experiment 2. RI-1 and RI-2 were separately increased to 5,10, and 20 sec from 1-sec training conditions. Increasing RI-1 produced greater declines in performance to light S1 than to tone S1 in both experiments. No such stimulus modality effect occurred for increases in RI-2 in these experiments. These results indicate that retrospection of S1 occurred during RI-1 and prospection of a response decision and reward expectancy primarily occurred during RI-2.
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Support for this research came from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Operating Grant A8249 and a University of Windsor research grant to the first author. Experiment 2 served as a thesis in partial fulfillment for the BA honors degree to the second author by the University of Windsor. Experiments 1 and 2 were initially presented at the Conference on Animal Learning, University of Toronto, June 1986.
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Cohen, J.S., Grassi, J. & Dowson, P. The role of within-trial location of the retention interval in rats’ delayed conditional discrimination performance. Animal Learning & Behavior 16, 40–46 (1988). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03209041
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03209041