Flash rate as a discriminandum in discrimination learning in rats.

Abstract

The experiments reported below were initiated by purely empirical considerations. Incidental observations suggested that albino rats found a discrimination based on steady vs. flashing light of equal intensity much more difficult than seemed reasonable on the basis of the imposing discriminability of the stimuli to human Os. Because of several potential virtues that flashing illumination possesses as a discriminandum, and the paucity of relevant data, a series of studies was undertaken which, as it turned out, produced results of unanticipated theoretical significance.It is convenient to distinguish between flashing light and flickering light, reserving the former term for stimuli having relatively slow rates, perhaps 8 per second or less. Of course flickering light, with rates of 15 to 40 per second, has often been used in studies concerned with critical flicker fusion (Landis, 1953). But apparently very few studies have used the slow rates employed in the present experiments, and so far as we know, none in a two-choice situation. EXPERIMENT 1 Method Subjects and ApparatusThe 5s were 11 experimentally naive, male albino rats, 70 to 90 days of age at the start of the study.Four units of an automatic Y-maze discrimination apparatus, fully described elsewhere (D'Amato & Jagoda, 1960), were used. ProcedurePretraining. Four days prior to the beginning of discrimination training, 5s were placed on a standard 23-hr, water-deprivation regimen. Each S was placed in a darkened arm of the maze and permitted to drink five dipperfuls of water on the day preceding the beginning of discrimination training and 3 dipperfuls on the subsequent day.

Flash rate discrimination in rats: Rate bisection and generalization peak shift

“…Upon a search of the literature to determine the best configuration of flashing lights to use as discriminative stimuli, we were struck by the dearth of experiments in which the behavior of rats (for pigeons, see Roberts, ) was brought under the stimulus control of different flash rates. In fact, we could not find a single unequivocal demonstration of stimulus control by flash rate in the rat despite many experiments demonstrating discriminated responding controlled by solid and flashing lights (D'Amato, ; Legg & Turkish, ; Mace, Mauro, Boyajian, & Eckert, ; Schechter & Winter, ). In none of these studies, however, was the behavior of the rats brought under the stimulus control of two different flash rates.…”

Rats can acquire conditional fear of faint light leaking through the acrylic resin used to mount fiber optic cannulas

“…"Excitatory" opsins (channelrhodopsin) are stimulated with pulsed light, whereas "inhibitory" opsins (ArchT and halorhodpin) require continuous light (Cardin et al 2010;Mattis et al 2012). Because pulsed and continuous stimuli appear to function differently as cues for rodent behavioral experiments (D'Amato 1961;Fox et al 2013), it may be that the potential for caplight effects varies across excitatory and inhibitory opsin experiments.…”