Effect of Different Amounts of Sexual Indulgence in the Albino Rat

Maternal age and male behavior in relation to successful reproduction by female rats ( Rattus norvegicus ).

“…However, research has also shown that a female's very capacity to reproduce declines dramatically with age. When females breed freely from puberty onward, for example, the size of successive litters first rises slightly from the first to the second or third, after which it falls steadily until total reproductive failure occurs between 16 and 24 mo (Ingram, 1959;Ingram, Mandl, & Zuckerman, 1958;King, 1924;Peng & Huang, 1972, Slonaker, 1928. When breeding is delayed until late in life, either females give birth to small litters which they have difficulty delivering and rearing, or, as is more often the case, they simply fail to conceive at all (Asdell, Bogart, & Sperling, 1941).…”

A Selective Look at Some Pre-Skinnerian Cumulative Recording Systems and Cumulative Records in Physiology and Psychology

“…Slonaker continued to publish prolifically on the subject of activity in rats into the 1930s, often using his revolving cages, but usually without including cumulative records (see e.g., Slonaker, 1925aSlonaker, , 1925bSlonaker, , 1927bSlonaker, , 1935. In the early 1920s, he abandoned the clock-based counters in favor of modified gas meter movements, because, he said, they were easier to read: "[t]he task of converting thousand of readings of the clocks into their equivalent numbers of revolutions has been so tedious and time consuming that a new device which gives the number of revolutions at reading has been substituted for the clocks" (Slonaker, 1923a, p. 275).…”

“…This suggests that Slonaker, like Skinner, was more of a tinkerer, making do with available resources, than an engineer systematically designing a solution to a problem. These gas meter counters nevertheless became the recording devices from which Slonaker's final two cumulative records were derived-appearing in a series of studies on the effects of sexual indulgence on a variety of behavioral measures in rats (Slonaker, 1927a(Slonaker, , 1927b(Slonaker, , 1927c(Slonaker, , 1928a(Slonaker, , 1928b).…”

Motivation.

“…An interesting extension of the study would be that of testing for the cumulative effect of satiations. Such an experiment would correspond more exactly to life situations in which one essays to determine the effects of excessive indulgence, as in the experiments of Slonaker (34).…”