Failure to learn in a taste aversion paradigm: Associative or performance deficit?

Riccio, David C.; Haroutunian, Vahram

doi:10.3758/bf03329329

Cited by 9 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…The age-related improvement in passive avoidance responding may represent another instance of the widely accepted, but sometimes overlooked (cf. Riccio & Haroutunian, 1977), distinction between learning and performance. What a young organism acquires, such as fear to environmental or response-linked stimuli, may fail to be expressed in performance until certain other mechanisms have developed more fully.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of delayed testing on passive avoidance of conditioned fear stimuli in young rats

Richardson

Ebner

Riccio

1981

Bull. Psychon. Soc.

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Deficits in passive avoidance learning in immature animals have been explained in terms of immature response-inhibition mechanisms, the role of age-specific defense responses to conditioned or unconditioned stimuli, or differential levels of fear acquisition. In Experiment 1, shock-elicited UCRs and fear strength were held constant by training all subjects at the same age. Sixteen-day-old rat pups received Pavlovian fear conditioning and were tested 1, 5, or 10 days later for passive avoidance of the conditioned stimuli. To offset retention losses, half of each group received a noncontingent footshock reactivation 24 h before testing. Passive avoidance latencies increased with delay (age) in reactivated groups. But with an active avoidance (escape from fear) measure (Experiment 2), performance was consistently poor and unrelated to age at testing. These data suggest that maturation of response-inhibition mechanisms may contribute to the ontogeny of passive avoidance performance. More generally, some implications of the distinction between learning and performance for developmental studies are considered. This research was supported in part by Grant MH-30223 to the third author. We thank William Jehle and David Zehr for their assistance on various aspects of the study.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of delayed testing on passive avoidance of conditioned fear stimuli in young rats

Richardson

Ebner

Riccio

1981

Bull. Psychon. Soc.

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“…The tendency of the taste of the food, rather than any other aspect, to become associated with illness is one of the best known characteristics of illness-induced learning. However, it should be remembered that despite occasional failures (Larsen & Hyde, 1977), it is possible for cues other than tastes to be associated with illness in rats, although often more trials and more careful training procedures are required (Riccio & Haroutunian, 1977;Rozin, 1969). P. J.…”

Section: Specificity Oj Cs To Usmentioning

confidence: 99%

Taste aversion and the generality of the laws of learning.

Logue¹

1979

Psychological Bulletin

303

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Results from research on aversions acquired through the pairing of ingested substances with illness have recently been used to challenge the assumption that there are laws of learning that hold across different species and tasks. The taste aversion literature is selectively reviewed and compared with data from traditional experiments in order to evaluate this challenge. Areas sufficiently documented or controversial to warrant inclusion are associative fluidity, conditioned stimulus and unconditioned stimulus characteristics, temporal relationships, obtaining and processing information, and age differences. The conclusion is that in no instance are different principles required to describe taste aversion and traditional learning. In some cases large parametric differences between the two research areas are apparent. It is suggested that at the present time it is not necessary to dispense with the notion of general laws of learning.An increasingly prevalent position in psychology is that more attention must be paid to previously ignored species-specific and taskspecific differences in the general laws of learning and that a reassessment of the field is necessary (see, e.

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“…Such recovery of performance suggests that cue-to-consequence performance deficits may similarly arise in part or entirely from retrieval failure rather than acquisition failure. This position is supported by evidence that audiovisual-toxin associations which fail to produce avoidance of the audiovisual cues will be manifest when assessed by indirect means such as sensory preconditioning (Archer & SjOden, 1982), transfer tests (Riccio & Haroutunian, 1977), potentiation (Morrison & Collyer, 1974), and blocking (Krane, 1980). Alternatively, these indirect indices may yield positive results, not because they tap difficult-to-retrieve associations, but because they are more sensitive to the weak, but readily retrievable, audiovisual-toxin associations that are widely acknowledged to occur.…”

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confidence: 70%

Reminder treatments do not alleviate cue-to-consequence deficits

Schachtman

Kasprow

Miller

1984

Animal Learning & Behavior

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Using rats in a conditioned lick suppression preparation, six experiments were conducted in which the subjects were exposed to a single tone-LiCI pairing. Despite evidence from tone-shock conditioning that the tone was an adequate conditioned stimulus and evidence from taste-LiCI conditioning that the LiCI was an adequate unconditioned stimulus, no suppression to the tone was observed following the tone-LiCIpairing, a finding consistent with prior cue-to-consequence research. In each experiment, subjects receiving a tone-LiCI pairing were subsequently exposed to either the tone or LiCI outside the conditioning context in an attempt to reactivate a potentially latent tone-LiCI association. The parameters of these reminder treatments were chosen on the basis of their previously proven effectiveness in reversing such performance deficits as blocking, overshadowing, latent inhibition, and experimental amnesia. Although a variety of stimulus parameters were used in an effort to reverse the cue-ro-consequence deficit, none of the experiments detected any tendency towards suppression by reminded subjects exposed to a tone-LiCI pairing. This uniform lack of reminder-induced recovery suggests that cue-toconsequence deficits reflect true acquisition failure rather than poor retrievability.Garcia and Koelling's (1966) "bright-noisy water" experiment caused a resurgence of interest in Thorndike's (1932) concept of "belongingness." Garcia and Koelling found that in rats an audiovisual cue would more readily act as a conditioned stimulus (CS) for footshock than for toxin, whereas a gustatoryolfactory cue would more readily act as a CS for toxin than for footshock. Using Seligman's (1970) terminology, we shall refer to a readily manifest association as being "prepared" and an association not readily manifest as being "contraprepared." This difference in preparedness, often referred to as the cue-to-consequence effect, does not necessarily prevent all responding based upon contraprepared associations between CSs and unconditioned stimuli (USs); rather, the effect is typically evident in a greater number of CS-US pairings being necessary to achieve behavioral control by contraprepared associations than prepared associations. Moreover, the asymptotic control exerted by contraprepared associations is ordinarily less robust (Seligman, 1970).Both Garcia and Koelling (1966) and Thorndike (1932) assumed that cue-to-consequence performance deficits were attributable to impaired acquisition. This interpretation has been widely accepted (e.g., Kalat, 1977;Seligman, 1970). However, in recent years several other associative performance

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Failure to learn in a taste aversion paradigm: Associative or performance deficit?

Cited by 9 publications

References 14 publications

Effects of delayed testing on passive avoidance of conditioned fear stimuli in young rats

Effects of delayed testing on passive avoidance of conditioned fear stimuli in young rats

Taste aversion and the generality of the laws of learning.

Reminder treatments do not alleviate cue-to-consequence deficits

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