DRL acquisition in rats with septal lesions

Caplan, Marjorie; Stamm, John S.

doi:10.3758/bf03330639

Cited by 30 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Previous attempts to alleviate the septal deficit on DRL have involved abrupt introduction and/or termination of some particular stimulus conditions and consequently have not resulted in a sustained improved performance once such procedures were discontinued (Braggio & Ellen, 1974, 1976Ellen & Butter, 1969;Slonaker & Hothersall, 1972). The present results, in concert with Caplan and Stamm (1967), would suggest that if the treatment procedure involves an easy-to-hard discrimination technique, efficient DRL performance can be maintained after the training procedure has been discontinued. That is, by gradually increasing the DRL delay (shaping) or by gradually decreasing the value of an external stimulus which sets the occasion for responding along some continuum (fading), stimulus control is transferred and a sustained improvement in performance is obtained after the removal of the cue.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 57%

“…Since under ordinary circumstances, the only differential stimulation available to the animal which could function to exert control over barpressing is that which arises from its own behavior, then perhaps, for the septal animal, inefficient performance on DRL reflects a failure of the response-produced stimulation to gain control over the behavior. Support for this view is found in the work of Caplan and Stamm (1967). These authors attempted to increase the control of response-produced stimuli over performance on the schedule by gradually shaping the animals into various DRL delays.…”

mentioning

confidence: 49%

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The effect of cue-fading on the DRL performance of septal and normal rats

1977

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The effect of a cue-light fading procedure on the subsequent noncued performance under a differential-reinforcement-of-Iow-rate schedule (DRL) of food reinforcement was determined for rats with septal lesions and normal rats. Following initial DRL-20 sec training. all animals were trained with a cued DRL schedule in which a light signaled the end of the required delay and the availability of reinforcement. Subsequently. for one-half of the animals. the cue light was abruptly discontinued; for the remainder of the subjects. the cue was gradually faded out over succeeding sessions. Septal animals. which had the cue gradually faded. were more efficient by the end of training than septal animals which had the light abruptly discontinued. Moreover. the former did not differ from normal controls. For septal animals in the Fade grouP. the relative frequency distributions of interresponse times (lRTs) were bimodal. a characteristic of normal animals;-.septal animals which had the cue abruptly terminated. displayed the unimodal distribution of IRTs which is a characteristic of septal animals on the DRL schedule. In summary. the cue-fading procedure completely eliminated the major differences in behavior between normal and septal rats typically observed on a DRL schedule of food reinforcement.It is well documented that septal animals perform less efficiently, i.e., they emit more responses per reinforcement (response/reinforcement ratio) than do normals on a differential-reinforcement-oflow-rate (DRL) schedule (Burkett & Bunnell, 1966;Ellen, Wilson, & Powell, 1964). A DRL schedule requires that the animal not respond for some minimum period of time. At the end of the required interval, a response will deliver the reinforcer; if the response is made before the required time has elapsed, reinforcement is not delivered and the clock is recycled. However, high response/ reinforcement ratios are not an invariant consequence of septal damage. A variety of techniques have been shown to attenuate the inefficiency of septal animals on a DRL schedule. For example, cued DRL (Aitken, 1974;Braggio & Ellen, 1976;Ellen & Butter, 1969) with a light as the cue signaling the end of the required delay has been used to decrease the response/reinforcement ratios. Providing the animal with a wooden block and cardboard to chew (Slonaker & Hothersall, 1972) has also produced more efficient septal performance on the DRL schedule. Braggio and Ellen (1974) press the lever was increased or decreased from a particular value as a function of time since the last response.Regardless of the technique used to reduce the response/reinforcement ratios of septal animals, the effectiveness of such procedures has been limited to the condition when the treatment was applied and did not carryover when the normal DRL procedure was reinstated. That is, performance reverted to the typical inefficient pattern when the additional stimuli were removed. Inasmuch as these response characteristics reappeared, Braggio and Ellen (1976) concluded that an inefficient perfor...

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 57%

mentioning

confidence: 49%

The effect of cue-fading on the DRL performance of septal and normal rats

1977

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“…Septal lesions impair passive avoidance in the absence of either deprivation or positive reinforcement (Beatty et aI., 1973;Slotnick and Jarvik, 1966) and reducing the quality of reward affects only the retention of passive avoidance behavior by rats with septal lesions; deficits in the acquisition of passive avoidance are not influenced by this manipulation (Beatty et aI., 1973). The usually robust deficits in DRL performance by animals with septal lesions which occur when the reinforcement schedule is abruptly shifted from CRF to a relatively stringent DRL contingency can be alleviated by gradually increasing the temporal requirements of the DRL contingency (Caplan & Stamm, 1967;Harvey & Hunt, 1965), signaling the availability of reinforcement with a visual cue (Ellen & Butter, 1969), enhancing proprioceptive feedback (Braggio & Ellen, 1974) or introducing other stimuli into the test environment which promote the development of adjunctive behaviors (Slonaker & Hothersall, 1972). The appearance of deficits in discrimination reversal following septal lesions is also highly dependent on the specific stimuli in the test situation.…”

Section: Discu~ionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Variations in magnitude of reward and position reversal learning following septal lesions in the rat

et al. 1975

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Two experiments examined the possibility that increased reactivity to positive reinforcement might contribute to the deficient performance on position reversal tasks by rats with septal lesions. Increasing the number of Noyes pellet rewards facilitated reversal learning by control subjects and by rats with septal lesions, but the magnitude of the impairment by the animals with lesions was not affected by the variation in quantity of reinforcement; regardless of the reward magnitude, rats with septal lesions exhibited impairments in performance that persisted for 10 reversals. Altering the quality of reinforcement also did not affect reversal performance by the animals with lesions.Lesions of the septal area disrupt performance on a number of tasks which require the subject to abandon an initially prepotent response including passive avoidance behavior (e.g., McCleary, 1961; see Fried, 1972 for additional references), responding on DRL schedules (e.g., Braggio & Ellen, 1974; Ellen, Wilson & Powell, 1964) and reversal of a position habit (e.g., Donovick, 1968; Hamilton, Kelsey, & Grossman, 1970;Schwartzbaum & Donovick, 1968). Septal lesions also enhance responsiveness to a wide range of positive reinforcers including water (e.g., Harvey & Hunt, 1965), sucrose (e.g., Beatty & Schwartzbaum, 1968; Neill, Ross, & Grossman, 1974), and Noyes pellets (Hothersall, Johnson, & Colleen, 1970). Recent findings indicate that the exaggerated reaction to positive reinforcement that accompanies damage to the septum contributes to the deficit in performance of passive avoidance ( In the present experiments, we evaluated the possibility that motivational changes might contribute to the deficits observed following septal lesions on position reversal learning. This possibility seemed worth assessing because deficits in position reversal after septal lesions are accompanied by more rapid performance on the task (Donovick, 1968;Schwartzbaum & Donovick, 1968). If exaggerated responsiveness to positive reinforcement is a factor in the deficient position reversal learning of rats with septal lesions, then reducing the attractiveness of the reinforcer by reducing its quality or quantity would be expected to attenuate the magnitude of the deficit. EXPERIMENT IIn this experiment, the effect of varying the quality of reinforcement by adulterating standard Noyes pellets with cellulose on reversal learning was studied. Reducing the attractiveness of the reinforcer in this way has been shown to reduce the deficit in passive avoidance behavior (Beatty et aJ., 1973) and DRL performance (Carlson et aJ., Note 1) in animals with septal lesions. MethodAnimals. The subjects were 17 naive male Holtzman rats that weighed 300-340 g at the start of the experiment. They were caged singly in an air-conditioned animal room that was illuminated from 0900 to 2100. Behavioral tests occurred during the light portion of the diurnal cycle. The rats were assigned randomly to one of three groups: One group (N = 6) received bilateral septal lesions and were rewa...

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“…These are schedules which normally maintain low response rates by omitting reinforcement for certain classes of response. Rats with septal damage emit more nonreinforced responses on both fixed-interval schedules (e.g., Ellen & Powell, 1962) and DRL schedules (e.g., Ellen, Wilson, & Powell, 1964) if the full valued DRL schedule is introduced relatively rapidly after continuous reinforcement (Caplan & Stamm , 1967) . This persistence can be regarded as another example of the failure of the omission of an expected reward to suppress responding following septal damage.…”

Section: Persistence Under Nonrewardmentioning

confidence: 99%

Response suppression and facilitation by aversive stimuli following septal lesions in rats: A review and model

Dickinson

1974

Psychobiology

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Evidence concerning the effects of septal damage on the performance of rats in tasks involving shock and frustrative nonreward is reviewed. It is argued that the behavior of rats with septal lesions cannot be understood in terms of either a change in the functional intensity of aversive stimuli or the ability to register contingencies between such stimuli and responding. Rather, the lesion appears to decrease the suppressive property of aversive stimuli while augmenting their facilitative or drive-enhancing property. On the basis of the evidence, a model of the processing of aversive stimuli is proposed. The model assumes that aversive stimuli are processed by two relatively independent systems: a response suppression system associated with septal functioning and a response facilitation system associated with amygdala functioning. While the facilitation mechanism is activated by stimuli of both positive and negative affective value, the suppression system is sensitive to only aversive events. Further, it is suggested that an additional septal mechanism, sensitive to both positive and negative stimuli exerts inhibitory control over the facilitation system. '

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DRL acquisition in rats with septal lesions

Cited by 30 publications

References 4 publications

The effect of cue-fading on the DRL performance of septal and normal rats

The effect of cue-fading on the DRL performance of septal and normal rats

Variations in magnitude of reward and position reversal learning following septal lesions in the rat

Response suppression and facilitation by aversive stimuli following septal lesions in rats: A review and model

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