Hollins CollegeDrive stimulus intensity for rats was manipulated by means of water temperature in a straight-alley tank, and reinforcement was manipulated independently by means of the differential temperature between the alley tank and a separate goal tank. Several studies are reported indicating that reinforcement is a major determinant of behavior in this escape conditioning situation. Drive stimulus intensity, on the other hand, apparently only has a differential effect at very high levels. Several advantages with this technique are pointed out including the fact that speed of swimming per se does not vary with training.
IN AN EABLIEB STUDY by the senior author (Woods, 1962) it was argued that research directed towards the problem of reactions to novelty should attend to the stimulus characteristics differentiating the novel environment from the environment in which the subject had been adapted. In that study the exploration elicited in a novel testing situation was greater for those subjects who had come from their home cages as compared with those who had been adapted to a "free environment." Since die testing situation was presumably equally novel for both groups, it could not be this factor of novelty which produced the differential performance. One interpretation of these findings, however, is that the testing apparatus represented an increase in complexity for the former group and a decrease in complexity for the latter; the heightened exploration, then, would be ascribed to the increase in complexity. As a follow-up it seemed desirable to manipulate more precisely both the complexity of the adaptation environment and the complexity of the testing environment, and to assess these manipulations against the introduction of what Berlyne has termed "relative novelty," that is, "... familiar elements or qualities in a combination or arrangement that had not been met with in the past." (Berlyne, 1960, p. 19). Complexity is, of course, an elusive concept, but we shall again follow Berlyne and mean by it "... the amount of variety or diversity in a stimulus pattern. . . . Other things being equal, complexity increases with the number of distinguishable elements" (Berlyne, 1960, p. 38). 'In the present study complexity was manipulated by means of the number of columns that were present in a 25-in.-square living and testing area. The presence of one column constituted the simple environment while the presence of nine columns constituted the complex one. Experimental subjects were adapted for 24 hours to one of these and then their behaviour was time-sampled in the other; both groups were thereby exposed to and tested in relatively novel situations, but this novel situation was more complex for one group and less complex for the other. Control subjects were tested in the same environment that they had adapted to.
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