Reinforcing limbic system stimulation and sodium amytal

Differences between behavior reinforced by electrical stimulation of the brain and conventionally reinforced behavior: An associative analysis.

“…Such factors as the time since the last ESB (Gallistel, 1969a(Gallistel, , 1969b, the number of trials since the shift from the short to the long intertrial interval (Panksepp et al, 1968), and the brain area (Scott, 1967) have been found to alter the degree of lability in the runway situation. Also, the drug sodium amytal, a fear-reducing drug (Miller, 1961b), has been found to eliminate the lability in the runway situation (Reid et al, 1970;Wasden & Reid, 1968). Finally, Kent and Grossman (1969) reported that animals that do not require free stimulation (priming) to induce them to perform in the runway do not run more slowly after the long intertrial intervals.…”

“…Overnight decrement. It has been reported that animals responding for ESB reward in the runway or in the maze situation show an overnight decrement in responding, with slower running time on the first trial of a day than on the last trial of the previous day or on subsequent trials of the same day (Kent & Grossman, 1969;Olds, 1956;Panksepp et al, 1968;Reid et al, 1970;Seward et al, 1960;Spear, 1962;Wasden & Reid, 1968;Wasden et al, 1965). An overnight decrement is sometimes seen with conventional rewards (Logan, 1960, p. 62), but it is not as large as in these studies with ESB reward.…”

“…Such factors as brain area (Kent & Grossman, 1969;Wasden et al, 1965), length of intertrial interval (Scott, 1967), and time since last ESB or priming stimulation (Gallistel, 1967;Kent & Grossman, 1969;Panksepp & Trowill, 1968;Wasden et al, 1965;Wetzel, 1963) have been found to affect the amount of overnight decrement. Also, the administration of the drug sodium amytal has been found to reduce or eliminate the overnight decrement, whether the ESB is given to the hypothalamus (Wasden & Reid, 1968) or to the forebrain (Reid et al, 1970). Finally, it has been found that animals trained to respond differentially to stable environmental or internal stimuli do not show an overnight decrement (Kornblith & Olds, 1968;Lenzer & Frommer, 1968).…”

“…Perhaps the major question in the study of behavior maintained by rewarding electrical stimulation of the brain (ESB) is whether or not ESB reward is fundamentally different from conventional rewards such as food and water. Some studies show that behavior maintained by ESB reward differs from behavior maintained by conventional rewards; several theories-including the drive decay (Deutsch, 1963;Deutsch & Deutsch, 1966;Deutsch & Howarth, 1963;Gallistel, 1964), the aversive aftereffects (Ball, 1967;Ball & Adams, 1965;Miller, 1961a), and the conflict (Kent & Grossman, 1969;Reid, Wasden, & Courtney, 1970;Wasden & Reid, 1968;Wasden, Reid, & Porter, 1965;Wetzel, 1963)-have been proposed to account for these behavioral differences in terms of a difference in the nature of the rewards. Other studies suggest that the behavioral differences can be reduced or eliminated by appropriate manipulations of training and deprivation conditions; this has led to an incentive theory (Trowill, Panksepp, & Gandelman, 1969) based on the idea that ESB reward has the same essential nature as conventional rewards.…”

Conditions under which amobarbital sodium influences contrast in consummatory behavior

“…ABS has been investigated in other situations in which it has been found to (1) increase approach behavior in the presence of stimuli signaling shock , (2) increase resistance to extinction (Barry, Wagner, & Miller, 1962), and (3) de• crease running times for electrical stimulation in vari-0090•5046/82/010122•07$00.95/0 ous limbic sites (Reid, Wasden, & Courtney, 1970). All of these effects, as well as others (e.g., Miller, 1961), could be attributed to fear-or frustrationreducing properties of the drug.…”