Three different techniques were employed to analyze the associative structures mediating performance on an instrumental biconditional discrimination, In all three experiments, rats were trained concurrently on two tasks in which different stimuli signaled which one of two responses would be followed by reward, In each task, one response was rewarded in one stimulus and the other response was rewarded in the other stimulus. Correct responses earned pellets in one task and sucrose in the other task. The transfer procedure was used in Experiment lA to identify whether or not an association developed between a biconditional discriminative stimulus and its instrumental outcome. Evidence was obtained that a biconditional cue elevated preferentially a new response trained with the same outcome. Experiments IB and 3 examined the potential contribution of this stimulus-outcome association to biconditional performance by training the biconditional cues as signals (8-s) for the nonreinforcement of a different response. There was no evidence that this operation interfered with the ability of a biconditional cue to control performance of its correct response. In Experiments 1B and 2, the value of the instrumental outcome was reduced in an attempt to assess the contribution of stimulus-response associations to performance on the biconditional discrimination. The results of Experiments IB and 2 reveal that correct responses were depressed following devaluation of the outcome used to train them, suggesting that learning about the response-outcome relation occurs.
Standardized exercise testing may provide a suitable paradigm with which to study the tendency to amplify symptoms and to somatize. The distress reported by different subjects at 80% of maximal exercise capacity may be considered an index of the discomfort engendered by a standardized stimulus, whereas the point of onset of discomfort may be a measure of the patient's threshold for becoming symptomatic. These findings are not conclusive, but do suggest that patients who are more anxious and under more stress tend to report more intense cardiopulmonary symptoms at comparable levels of physiological arousal, and to have a lower threshold for experiencing discomfort.
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