Naive rats were trained to respond on one lever in the presence of noise bursts from one speaker and on a second lever in the presence of noise bursts from a second speaker. The speakers were mounted behind the levers. When responding on the lever adjacent to the sounding speaker was reinforced, control developed within fewer than five trials. When responding on the nonadjacent lever was selectively reinforced, responding on the lever adjacent to the sounding speaker increased in probability for several sessions. Naive rats were trained to respond on the nonadjacent lever following preexposure to the sound. Responding on the lever adjacent to the sounding speaker increased in probability, showing that novelty was not responsible for the effect. Naive rats were run on automaintenance procedures in which there was no explicit pairing of sound and magazine operation, 100% pairing of sound and magazine operation, or magazine operation following 40% of sound presentations. None of the rats acquired the response of approaching and sniffing the sounding speaker, indicating that sound-magazine pairing was not responsible for the effect.Key words: auditory discrimination, lever press, reinforcement, ratsMammals have evolved a number of specific abilities which enable them to acquire certain auditory discriminations readily. For example, the ability of rats and monkeys readily to discriminate the position of sounds is a function of the complexity of the spectral content of the sound (Beecher & Harrison, 1971;Brown, Beecher, Moody, & Stebbins, 1975;Harrison & Beecher, 1969;Harrison & Briggs, 1977), and of the relative positions of the sound source and response sites (Downey & Harrison, 1972Harrison, Downey, Segal, & Howe, 1971;Harrison, Iversen, & Pratt, 1977). White noise is more salient than a pure tone (Segal & Harrison, 1978), and hedgehogs, in contrast to cats and tree shrews, cannot discriminate the position of a pure tone below about 15 kHz, although such sounds are well within their range of hearing (Masterton, Thompson, Bechtold, & Robards, 1975 tory discrimination. The general approach to the problem is to find an auditory discrimination which is rapidly acquired (suggestive of specialization) and then to analyse the discrimination with respect to possible specializations which are responsible for the rapid acquisition. The discrimination of the position of sounds of complex spectral content is acquired within one or two trials (Beecher & Harrison, 1971) and is thus suitable for investigation of the special processes underlying the rapid acquisition. Rapid acquisition may depend on a special effect of reinforcement upon the response of approaching the sound source. When an animal behaviorally interacts with a sound source under natural conditions, the source must necessarily be approached. The ubiquity of the need for this approach response over the evolutionary history of the animal may be reflected in the behavioral effect of reinforcing a response in the presence of the sound. Briefly, whatever response is dif...
Stimuli in many visual stimulus control studies typically are presented simultaneously; in contrast the stimuli in auditory discrimination studies are presented successively. Many everyday auditory stimuli that control responding occur simultaneously. This suggests that simultaneous auditory discriminations should be readily acquired. The purpose of the present experiment was to train rats in a simultaneous auditory discrimination. The apparatus consisted of a cage with two response levers mounted on one wall and a speaker mounted adjacent to each lever. A feeder was mounted on the opposite wall. In a go-right/go-left procedure, two stimuli were presented on each trial, a wide-band noise burst through one speaker and a 2-kHz complex signal through the other. The stimuli alternated randomly from side to side across trials, and the stimulus correlated with reinforcement for presses varied across subjects. The rats acquired the discrimination in 400 to 700 trials, and no response position preference developed during acquisition. The ease with which the simultaneous discrimination was acquired suggests that procedures, such as matching to sample, that require simultaneous presentation of stimuli can be used with auditory stimuli in animals having poor vision.
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