Social facilitation and sensory deprivation in operant behavior of rats

Abstract

(Hahn, 1965). In an earlier experiment Hatch et al (1963) concluded that individual isolation of rats, for 3 months, was stressful and resulted in ascending caudal dermatitis in 100% of the isolated rats and that they were "aggressive and intractable animals." On the other hand, there is evidence from some time ago that solitary cockroaches needed significantly less time (Gates & Allee, 1933) to learn an E-shaped maze than grouped Ss. Thus, although evidence is clear that there is social facilitation in human problem solving from earlier (Aliport, 1924) and more recent findings (Pishkin & Blanchard, 1963), this evidence for facilitation in learning is not always consistent with animal results.Since in a previous study with individual rats (Pishkin & Shurley, 1966) it was shown that sensory deprivation (SD) was stressful and profoundly diminished performance on an operant task, the present study was designed to test the effects of social isolation and dyadic group living before and during SD upon subsequent operant conditioning. It was hypothesized that negative, stress effects of SD would be diminished in social conditions, where presence of another animal would be an additional source of sensory input and that rats caged in pairs would show superior performance on a subsequent operant task. MethodThe Ss were 35 female albino rats of the Holtzman strain with an average weight of 264 gm. They were 52 days old at the start of the experiment. The first phase of this study consisted of splitting the Ss into two groups: 10 rats, at random, were individually caged (IC) and the remaining 20 were randomly paired