Four groups of rat subjects were reared for 45 days in one of four environments (two enriched, a normal, and a deprived, respectively). Following the rearing period, all subjects were administered an ll-day training/testing session consisting of: (1) exposure to free food, (2) barpress training, and (3) choice between obtaining food freely or via barpressing. The results indicated that subjects reared in the deprived environment preferred to barpress significantly more than all other groups. Attention is directed toward a consideration of manipulatory behavior in explaining these results.Influential publications by Jensen (1963) and Neuringer (1969) have indicated, somewhat surprisingly, that under some conditions animals may prefer to perform an. operant task in order to obtain reinforcement rather than simply "freeload." Subsequent investigations have concerned themselves with an identification of those variables influencing this "contrafreeloading" phenomenon. For example, Tarte and Snyder (1972) reported that preference for barpressing was positively related to the length of deprivation. More recently, it has been suggested by Tarte, Towfl-Send, and Vernon (1973) that the type of rearing environment may have a direct bearing on preference for barpressing. These investigators found that rat subjects reared in stimulus-enriched and stimulus-deprived conditions barpressed significantly less than did subjects reared in motor-enriched and control (standard laboratory cage) conditions. Tarte et al. (1973) suggested that differences in exploratory behavior were responsible for these results. More specifically, it was proposed that the greater the similarity between rearing conditions and the testing situation the greater the exploratory behavior (i.e., barpressing) that would be shown in the testing situation.The present experiment was designed to further investigate the relationship between early environmental rearing conditions and the contrafreeloading phenomenon. To accomplish this, four types of early rearing environments were employed: (1) enriched similar-containing features similar to the testing
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