Microprocessor control and A/D data acquisition in classical conditioning

Abstract

An Apple II1FIRST system has been developed to control classical conditioning experiments, collect analog data, and to extract dependent variable measures of conditioning. With our selection of the Apple II microprocessor and an added hardware floating-point processor, we have been able to establish independent computer systems for each of our three conditioning laboratories at a fraction of the cost of our DEC PDP-8/e (which was interfaced to only one of our laboratories). Moreover, our software system, FIRST, an interactive, high-level, dictionarybased language, is a programming and control system whose flexibility and ease of programming far exceeds that experienced with our DEC

Compound-component differentiation as a function of CS-US interval and CS duration in the rabbit’s conditioned nictitating membrane response

“…The US was a 50-msec, 3-mA, 50-Hz ac shock delivered via stainless steel Autoclip wound clips positioned 10 mm apart and 15 mm posterior to the dorsal canthus of the right eye. The sequence and timing of stimulus events were controlled by an Apple n computer equipped with interfaces and software developed by Scandrett and Gormezano (1980).…”

LAB-FORTH software package

“…It is well documented that FORTH is an outstanding software tool in laboratory computer control systems (Berg & Kaiser, 1985;Lea, 1982;Marshall-Goodell, Gormezano, Scandrett, & Cacioppo, 1981;Orr, 1984;Scandrett & Gormezano, 1980). Among the attractive features of FORTH are the following.…”

An inexpensive interface for the IBM PC/XT and compatibles

“…However, we use the intermediate language, Forth, to pull the bits of machine code together. Like the First language used by Scandrett and Gormezano (1980), Forth is a threaded interpretive language. Forth was chosen because it is easy to integrate machine code directly in the Forth stream, and because Forth is easy to debug, readily available for a wide range of computers, and documented in a number of readily available books.…”