The experiments reported below were initiated by purely empirical considerations. Incidental observations suggested that albino rats found a discrimination based on steady vs. flashing light of equal intensity much more difficult than seemed reasonable on the basis of the imposing discriminability of the stimuli to human Os. Because of several potential virtues that flashing illumination possesses as a discriminandum, and the paucity of relevant data, a series of studies was undertaken which, as it turned out, produced results of unanticipated theoretical significance.It is convenient to distinguish between flashing light and flickering light, reserving the former term for stimuli having relatively slow rates, perhaps 8 per second or less. Of course flickering light, with rates of 15 to 40 per second, has often been used in studies concerned with critical flicker fusion (Landis, 1953). But apparently very few studies have used the slow rates employed in the present experiments, and so far as we know, none in a two-choice situation.
EXPERIMENT 1
Method
Subjects and ApparatusThe 5s were 11 experimentally naive, male albino rats, 70 to 90 days of age at the start of the study.Four units of an automatic Y-maze discrimination apparatus, fully described elsewhere (D'Amato & Jagoda, 1960), were used.
ProcedurePretraining. Four days prior to the beginning of discrimination training, 5s were placed on a standard 23-hr, water-deprivation regimen. Each S was placed in a darkened arm of the maze and permitted to drink five dipperfuls of water on the day preceding the beginning of discrimination training and 3 dipperfuls on the subsequent day.
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