A confounding of conditioned suppression in passive avoidance: ECS effects

Abstract

Shock administered either contingent upon or between bar presses reduced bar press rates. Extinction to situational cues and a series of seven EeSs starting 24 h after shock raised bar press rates, indicating that conditioned suppression occurs in passive avoidance conditioning.

Step-down passive avoidance: CER or specific avoidance?

“…Thus, a specific avoidance response was leamed and was more important to this passive avoidance than was CER. 'Ibis result is 28 inconsistent with the work of Spevack & Suboski (1967), wh ich indicated that the punishment contingency was unimportant, i.e., the noncontingent group exhibited as much fear as the response-contingent group in that barpress situation.…”

“…Experimental distinction between response-contingent punishment and CER contributions to passive avoidance performance must be made in order to establish which component is of primary importance, Dawson (1971) has further suggested that workable criteria for distinguishing between the CER and the specific avoidance response are lacking. However, Spevack & Suboski (1967) did provide an experimental distinction in a barpress situation by presenting footshock either as a consequence of a barpress or while S was at the foodcup, Le ., response-contingent or noncontingent punishment. Both groups exhibited fear, which suggested that CER was a very important factor in barpress suppressioT he presentation of footshock in a step-down passive avoidance task also may be either response-contingent or noncontingent.…”

Temporal gradient of recovery of a conditioned emotional response following a single electroconvulsive shock

“…The Ss showed recovery of the CER sometime between 4 and 30 days after the last ECS, with the course of recovery depending in part on the number and spacing of the ECS treatments. Spevack & Suboski (1967) similarly found that aseries of 7 ECS treatments produced a suppression of an avoidance response in rats when the animals were tested 48 h later.…”

Effects of cortical spreading depression and ether following one-trial discriminated avoidance learning

“…Those studies (e.g., Pearlman, Sharpless, & Jarvik, 1961;Bures & Buresova, 1963) which have used amnestic agents ha.ve in most cases used a one-trial passive avoidance conditiOning paradigm in which a highly probable response is followed by a single punishing shock. However, in one-trial passive avoidance conditioning a generalized conditioned emotional response of "freezing," i.e., suppression of ongoing behavior, and passive avoidance of the punished response cannot be easily distinguished (Spevack & Suboski, 1967). If an animal fails to make a response previously followed by shock, he may have learned not to make that particular response or it may be indicative of a general suppression of behavior.…”