Sensitization to and conditioning with apomorphine in pigeons

Burg, Brigitte; Haase, Christian; Lindenblatt, Ulrike; Delius, Juan D.

doi:10.1016/0091-3057(89)90353-5

Cited by 13 publications

(19 citation statements)

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“…The present experiment was simply not designed to assess a mere conditioned response enhancement but was instead aimed at measuring a conditioned discriminative responding. It is pertinent here that pigeons, like rodents, have also been shown to prefer to revisit a cage in which they were previously treated with apomorphine than to revisit one in which they were previously treated with saline (place conditioning; Burg et al 1989). This indicates that apomorphine administration, besides eliciting a pecking response has a rewarding effect, a circumstance that is in line with much evidence that dopaminergic transmission is heavily implicated in the neural signalling of reward (Wise and Rompre 1989).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Discriminative learning occasioned by the administration of a dopamine agonist

Keller

Delius

2001

Psychopharmacology

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Rationale: The repeated administration of psychostimulants usually brings about a progressive increment of the behavioral responses that they induce. We examined to what extent this sensitization is due to an associative learning process. Objectives: The dopamine agonist apomorphine elicits stereotyped pecking in pigeons, a response that increases with successive intramuscular injections. We tested whether this sensitized pecking would be discriminatively directed at environmental stimuli that had been present during the sensitization phase. Methods: In a preliminary experiment we identified a pair of stimulus compounds that attracted an equal number of apomorphine peck responses. During discrimination training naive pigeons were exposed on 5 days to both a cage furnished with one of these stimuli after having been injected with apomorphine and to a cage furnished with the other stimuli after having been injected with saline. Then the birds were administered apomorphine (or saline) and tested in a cage that offered both compound stimuli simultaneously. A discrimination reversal training and renewed tests followed. Results:The tests under apomorphine and saline showed that the pecking by the pigeons was virtually exclusively aimed at the specific environmental stimuli under which the sensitization to apomorphine had taken place. This discriminative stimulus control was reversed after the pigeons had been retrained with converse stimulus compound allocations. Conclusions: The sensitized apomorphine pecking of pigeons was subject to close control by environmental stimuli. The results thus support the hypothesis that the sensitization to psychostimulants may be due to a conditioning process. The conditioning occasioned by apomorphine injections in birds could be a useful model for the study of sensory-motor learning processes.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Discriminative learning occasioned by the administration of a dopamine agonist

Keller

Delius

2001

Psychopharmacology

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“…Experiments carried out in our laboratory have consistently shown that in pigeons the sensitization, or more precisely the IR, that develops upon repeated administration of apo is strongly cage-environment specific (Experiment 4; Burg et al, 1989;Godoy and Delius, 1999;Keller and Delius, 2001;Acerbo et al, 2003a; cf. also Akins and Geary, 2008, cocaine in quail).…”

Section: Conditioned Sensitizationmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…The overall results support the view that differences in apo responsiveness of pigeons have a genetic background. Experiment 4: sensitization context specificity Burg et al (1989) suggested that the sensitization to apo was context dependent, in the sense that the IR that had been induced in one kind of distinctive experimental cage did not transfer to a markedly different kind of experimental cage. This is in agreement with the results of experiments in which a reduction of the day 1 response to apo brought about by coadministration of dopamine antagonists was correlated with a lesser response increment until day 6 and a smaller response after saline-only treatment on day 7 (Acerbo et al, 2003a;Acerbo and Delius, 2004; see also Discussion of Experiment 8).…”

Section: Experiments 3: Selected Parentagementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Apo conforms with this rule, inasmuch as it has been shown that rats and monkeys will learn to self-administer small doses of intravenous apo by lever-pressing (Baxter et al, 1974;Woolverton et al, 1984). Burg et al (1989), using a Y-maze with two differently decorated goal cages, showed that pigeons that had been repeatedly injected with apo in one goal cage and with saline in the other one showed a marked preference to move into the apo-associated cage when later allowed to choose while untreated (cf. Delius, unpublished), but intraperitoneal self-administration might be a viable alternative technique.…”

Section: Conditioned Sensitizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In earlier publications, we have explored several of the variables influencing this spectacular response (Deviche, 1983;Delius, 1985;Delius, 1987, 1988;Burg et al, 1989;Siemann and Delius, 1992a;Delius, 1995, 1996;Godoy and Delius, 1999;Keller and Delius, 2001;Keller et al, 2002;Acerbo et al, 2003aAcerbo et al, , 2003bAcerbo and Delius, 2004). Pecking elicited by apo in birds is an impressive response.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sensitization to apomorphine in pigeons

Delius

Acerbo

Krug

et al. 2015

Behavioural Pharmacology

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Apomorphine (apo), an unspecific direct dopamine agonist, elicits an intense and lasting pecking bout in pigeons. Apo yielded orderly dose-response functions, and repeated administrations led to sensitization. Strain and individual differences in sensitivity to apo were at least partly due to genetic factors. However, a strong cage-context dependency of the sensitization, which is indicative of conditioning, occurred in both pigeon strains studied. Apo-induced pecking and sensitization also occurred in total darkness. Pigeons could be conditioned to discriminate between an apo state and a non-apo state. A small dose of apo was effective as a conditioned stimulus when paired with a high dose as an unconditioned stimulus. The conditioned response (CR) was strongly specific to the context in which the sensitization to apo took place. The resistance to extinction of the CR could be increased through an oversensitization treatment. The incremental responses arising during the sensitization treatment and the CRs shown afterward by individual pigeons correlated significantly. The sensitization to apo in pigeons is well accounted for by a conditioning schema in which an interoceptive drug state is a conditional conditioned stimulus for the full expression of the incremental response. Variants of the scheme might also account for the sensitization of rodents to psychostimulants. A neural model that embodies the characteristics of the conditioning scheme has been proposed.

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Modulation of visual perception and action by forebrain structures and their interactions in amphibians

Ewert

Schwippert

Neurotransmitter Interactions and Cognitive Function

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Nervous systems of lower animals appraised simple prove to be relatively complexDo amphibians "know" while humans "learn"?Towards the middle of the last century, many ethologists suggested that behaviors displayed among so-called "lower" invertebrates or vertebrates -such as some crustaceans or amphibians, respectively -are predominantly innate and rigid in their performance (e.g., [1]). Moreover, responses to behaviorally significant sign stimuli should proceed reflex-like, for example, the lobster's tailflip-reflex in response to a threatening stimulus (e.g., [2]) and the toad's snap-reflex in response to a prey stimulus (e.g., [3]). In detail it was assumed, that a sign [key] stimulus activates an innate releasing mechanism (IRM), that -much like a safe is unlocked by a keyreleases the corresponding action pattern (e.g., [4,5]). According to the IRM concept, (re-)cognition and motor skills are innate. Neurophysiologically, the concept of IRM suggests an inborn sensorimotor interface that translates perception into action: recognizing ("detecting") the sign stimulus at its afferent input-side and activating ("commanding") the corresponding motor system at the efferent output-side. Hence, the concepts of "feature detector" and "command neuron" were born (e.g., [6,7]). Theoretically, the simplest innate releasing mechanism would consist of a command neuron, CN, operating in a chain like: sign-stimulus → CN → motor pattern generator → behavior In this case, the commanding neuron should be a cell specifically tuned to the feature of the sign stimulus, and the axon of that neuron should have access to the motor pattern generating network.Meanwhile, the concepts of command neuron and innate releasing mechanism were revisited and revised from many points of view (e.g., [8][9][10][11][12][13]). First of all, appetitive and consummative behavioral responses both in so-called lower and higher animals depend on state-dependent modulatory influences (referring to motivation

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Sensitization to and conditioning with apomorphine in pigeons

Cited by 13 publications

References 15 publications

Discriminative learning occasioned by the administration of a dopamine agonist

Discriminative learning occasioned by the administration of a dopamine agonist

Sensitization to apomorphine in pigeons

Modulation of visual perception and action by forebrain structures and their interactions in amphibians

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