Increase over time in the stimulus generalization of acquired fear.

McAllister, Wallace R.; McAllister, Dorothy E.

doi:10.1037/h0046583

Cited by 111 publications

(77 citation statements)

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“…If avoidance performance is an indicator of the degree offear elicited by the CS then the improved performance after a long intersession interval in the present study is readily understood. However, in recent studies (McAllister & McAllister, 1963;Saltz & Asdourian, 1963) evidence has been obtained which indicates that the" incubation" effect may be due, not to an increase in fear to the CS, but to increased generalization or spread of fear with time after training. In both studies, it was found that avoidance responding by rats was better 24 hr.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of intersession interval in shuttle- box conditioning of the guinea-pig

Webster

Rabedeau

1964

Psychon Sci

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·AbstractSixty guinea-pigs were given 50 avoidance conditioning trials in a shuttle-box and then retested either 0, I, 24, 48, of 168 hr. later. Little improvement in performance was observed within sessions but animals retested at 48-and 168-hr. intersession intervals were substantially better than all others. ProblemIn a study of shuttle-box avoidance conditioning in guinea-pigs, the authors found that animals made few avoidance responses in 50 or even 150 trials and showed little or no improvement in performance over trials. If the Ss were given a second training session two days later, a striking improvement was noted. One S made only three avoidance responses in the first session of 50 trials (only 1 in the last 20 trials) but made 18 avoidance responses in a 20 trial session two days later. The present study was conducted to confirm these observations and to explore the improvement in performance as a function ofthe duration ofthe intersession interval. MetbodThe Ss were 60 experimentally naive, young, female gUinea-pigs ranging in weight from 320 gm to 515 gm at the start of the experiment. The apparatus was a two compartment shuttle-box 30 in long, 6 in high and 7 in wida. There was no partition between the two halves of the box. The top and front side of the box were made of Plexiglas, the back and ends were unpainted plywood. The floor of each compartment consisted of 30 metal rods set 1/2 in apart. The CS was from a Holtzer Cabot 24-v buzzer suspended 9 1/2 in above the center of the box and from one of two 25-w lights mounted 2 1/2 in above the Plexiglas top at the ends of the box. The light over the compartment occupied by S was made to flash at 1 cycle per sec. A scrambled shock source (GrasonStadler, Model E6070B) supplied 3 ma at 350 v, 60 cycles, A. C.The first training session was the same for all Ss. After a 5-min. habituation period in the apparatus, each S was presented with the CS alone until no reaction was made for three consecutive trials. After the Ss had become acclimatized to the CS, 50 delay conditioning trials with a 10-sec. CS-UCS interval and I-min. intertrial interval were given. Both CS and UCS were terminated when the S crossed the center line of the shuttle-box.The 60 Ss were randomly assigned to five experimental groups with 12 Ss in each group. Each group received a second training session of 25 trials after an interval of 0, I, 24, 48, or 168 hr. With the exception Ptychon., Sci., 1964, Jlol. 1. C. D. Webster and Ronald G. RabedeauQUEEN'S UN~IT~ CANADA of the 0 interval group, Ss were returned to their living cages for the appropriate interval between sessions. In order to equate handling, Ss in the 0 interval group were taken from the apparatus after the 50 trials of the first session and replaced 30 sec. later. ResultsThe results in terms of percentage avoidance responses in blocks of trials are shown in Fig. 1. Since an analysis of variance on total number of avoidance responses for different groups in the first session was not significant, the individual group curves ha...

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of intersession interval in shuttle- box conditioning of the guinea-pig

Webster

Rabedeau

1964

Psychon Sci

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“…The absence of reactivity to delayed contextual change occurred in our conditions, whereas the running response was well maintained. The most widely accepted explanation is to consider that the animals forget the initial precise features of the stimulus on which change occurred (pattern of the walls) before they forget the target memory (i.e., the running response) (W. R. McAllister & D. E. McAllister, 1963;Perkins & Weyant, 1958;Spear, 1978).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These data were confirmed by Steinman (1967), who obtained the same results using 1 and 66 days. A disruptive effect on test performance, resulting from a contextual change made only shortly after initial training, has been shown to occur with both appetitive tasks (Perkins & Weyant, 1958;Steinman, 1967) and aversively motivated tasks (Desiderato, Butler, & Meyer, 1966;W. R. McAllister & D. E. McAllister, 1963;Pesselman & Riccio, 1980;Richardson, Riccio, Guanowsky, & Okonkwo, 1983;Seybert, Wilson, & Archer, 1982).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Similar evidence comes from studies with animals, which exhibit poor performance when the environmental context is modified between training and testing. Such alterations of the context may concern external stimuli, change of experimental room (Gordon, McCracken, Dess-Beech, & Mowrer, 1981), slight modifications of the training apparatus (Perkins & Weyant, 1958;W. R. McAllister & D. E. McAllister, 1963), or internal stimuli, such as changes in the internal state of the animal following injections of drugs (cf.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Does contextual change determine long-term forgetting?

Gisquet-Verrier

Alexinsky

1986

Animal Learning & Behavior

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A series of experiments were run to test the hypothesis that "spontaneous forgetting" could result from subtle contextual changes. The first experiment demonstrated that when SpragueDawley male rats are trained in a runway alley with a food reinforcer, retention performance is dramatically affected by a change in the pattern of the walls of the training apparatus when testing takes place 1, 3, or 5 days following training and not after 1 week. Experiment 2 demonstrated that this performance deficit cannot be alleviated by any of the three selected cuing treatments, whereas "spontaneous forgetting" (resulting from a training-to-test interval of 14 days) can be. These data indicate that the detrimental effect of contextual change reduces over time, and that such an effect cannot be interpreted in terms of retrieval failure. These results lend strong support to the argument that the disruptive contextual change effect is basically different from the disruptive effect that results from an extended training-to-test interval.

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“…Further, investigations have documented the effect of time on the phenomenon of stimulus generalization: As the temporal interval between training and testing increases, so does the likelihood of responding to a greater range ofstimuli (McAllister & McAllister, 1963;Perkins & Weyant, 1958; D. R. Thomas & Lopez, 1962).…”

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confidence: 99%