Deprivation stimulus intensity and incentive factors in the control of instrumental responding.

Abstract

In Experiment 1, control of instrumental responding by deprivation-intensity cues was demonstrated. Rats anticipated the occurrence of punishment in the goal box when the occurrence of punishment was predictable on the basis of degree of food deprivation (a food reward was given on all trials). In Experiment 2, control of instrumental responding by deprivation-intensity cues was measured separately from other effects of deprivation, by correlating the occurrence of food reward or nonreward with deprivation intensity. Half of the rats received food reward under high deprivation and nonreward under low deprivation; the other half received the reverse deprivation-goal event correlation. Initially, rats run faster on all trials, the higher the deprivation under which reward was experienced, an effect suggesting that food produces stronger conditioning or is more reinforcing or produces greater incentive, the higher the deprivation under which it is experienced. Later in training, rats ran more rapidly under their rewarded deprivation than under their nonrewarded deprivation whether their rewarded deprivation was high, low, or very low. These results indicate that deprivationstimulus-intensity cues can exert strong control over instrumental responding and that this effect occurs later in training than the effects of deprivation on reinforcement or incentive. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Taste preferences as a function of food deprivation during original taste exposure

“…If rats associate the consumption of flavors with the deprivation under which the flavors were given in training, then in testing they will show higher consumption of the flavor they were trained with under each deprivation than of the flavor they did not receive under that deprivation. These data are consistent with other data we have presented recently showing strong control over behavior by internal deprivation-related cues (Capaldi & Davidson, 1979;Capaldi, Viveiros, & Davidson, 1981). However, in Experiment I, the association is not directly betweenthe deprivation cue and a response but, rather, between a taste and consumption, conditional on a particular deprivation cue.…”

“…To accomplish this and to still have a wide range of hunger levels, rats were fed every other day. We have used this procedure successfully previously (Capaldi et al, 1981). Group HL received their first flavor before being fed (high deprivation, H) and their second flavor after being fed (low deprivation, L).…”

Hunger as a Context: Food Seeking That Is Inhibited During Hunger Can Renew in the Context of Satiety

“…The failure to observe AAB renewal might also point to features of interoceptive satiety and deprivation cues that make them different from the exteroceptive contexts usually used in the renewal literature. The evidence that interoceptive hunger and thirst states can serve as discriminative cues was once controversial (e.g., Bolles, 1975); one complication among others might have been that the discriminative effects of deprivation and satiety states interact with their motivating effects (e.g., Capaldi et al, 1981). In our experiments, renewal always took the form of satiety increasing the level of food-motivated responding.…”

The motivation produced by morphine and food is isomorphic: Approaches to specific motivational stimuli are learned

“…Through this association in time between the attenuation of the perceptual cues of hunger and food consumption, the perceptual effects of food deprivation may come to act as powerful discriminative cues for appetitive responses to food. Interestingly, in contrast to earlier failed attempts to condition an instrumental response to an internal cue derived from states of deprivation (Bolles, 1975;Webb, 1955), numerous studies have recently demonstrated that the intensity of food deprivation can indeed produce discriminative cues that can control instrumental responses (Capaldi & Davidson, 1979;Capaldi, Viveiros, & Davidson, 1981;Corwin, Woolverton, & Schuster, 1990;Schechter, 1990), as well as enter into Pavlovian conditional discriminations (Davidson, 1987;Davidson, Flynn, & Jarrard, 1992). Perhaps environmental cues that come to condition feeding behavior (Weingarten, 1985) do so by eliciting the discriminative effects of food deprivation.…”