Simple delayed discrimination of tastes in the rat

Abstract

Although taste memory has been extensively studied within the context of long-delay taste aversion learning, little attention has been devoted to taste memory within more traditional memory designs, for example, simple delayed discriminations. This was examined in the present experiment. Specifically, following taste discrimination training during which responding was reinforced following exposure to only one of two tastes, delays were imposed between sampling of the initial taste and the opportunity to respond. On the average, subjects were able to perform the simple delayed taste discrimination with an accuracy of 80% or better at a delay of 45 sec. Discrimination performance returned to chance at an average delay of 58 sec. Taste memory within the simple delayed discrimination paradigm is discussed and compared with other assessments of short-term memory in the rat and other species.Although considerable attention has been devoted to taste memory, its analysis has been primarily restricted to the taste aversion design (see

Memory for tastes in an operant delayed discrimination

“…Interestingly, using saccharin and sodium chloride as discriminative stimuli for rats in a simple delayed discrimination procedure, Olin and Riley (1986) obtained above-ehance performance at average delays of only 45 sec. Far from demonstrating the long-lived…”