A Chronic Electrode for Peripheral Nerve Stimulation: Application for Vagal Stimulation

In order to determine whether parasympathetio stimulation given coincidentally with electric shock in a "fear-conditioning" situation would alter later performance on an avoidance conditioning task, one group of 10 subjects was implanted with a small chronic electrode around the cervical vagus. During preconditioning, consisting of 8 trials of tone followed by inescapable shock, one group of animals received stimulation of the vagus at the time foot shock was delivered. During subsequent avoidance conditioning, these subjects performed the avoidance task significantly better than subjects that received the same preconditioning without vagal stimulation and as well as subjects that had received no preconditioning shock trials.Recently DiCara and Weiss (1969) evaluated the effects of heart rate (HR) increase or decrease produced in curarized rats by avoidance training on the learning of a later skeletal avoidance response. They found that subjects reinforced for HR decrease in the pretraining phase were not significantly different from naive control subjects, while subjects reinforced for HR increase showed "freezing" behavior and generally failed to learn the avoidance response. The performance of the HR-increase group suggests that fear was transferred from the HR task to the skeletal avoidance task and that it was specific to the conditioned stimulus (OS). Subjects in this group "froze" to the tonal CS and could not learn a one-way avoidance task. The only known difference between these groups was the direction in which subjects learned to alter HR. The goal of the present study was to see if similar effects would be obtained when HR decrease was produced by a different method and in a different pretraining situation. In the present study a chronic electrode for stimulating the vagus nerve was used to alter autonomic reactivity during pretraining, which consisted of 8 trials of tone followed by inescapable grid shock in one group of subjects. Their performance on a later skeletally mediated 1 Requests for reprints should be sent to John

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A Chronic Electrode for Peripheral Nerve Stimulation: Application for Vagal Stimulation

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Electrical Stimulation of Peripheral Nerve

Electrical Stimulation of Peripheral Nerve

Effects of vagal stimulation on the learning of specific and diffuse conditioned suppression

Effects on avoidance performance of vagal stimulation during previous fear conditioning in rats.

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