Shuttlebox avoidance to intense white noise: Acquisition and the Kamin effect in rats

Abstract

Experiment I demonstrated shuttlebox avoidance conditioning using intense white noise as a ues.Ten rats were given 25 trials a day for 6 days. Escape latencies declined and avoidance responses increased over trial blocks. Experiment II provided support for a functional similarity between shock as a ues and intense noise as a ues by demonstrating the Kamin effect following incomplete shuttlebox training to noise. Separate groups of rats were given 25 trials followed by an additional 25 trials either 0, 1, 4, or 24 h later. The U-shaped Kamin effect was evident in the avoidance measure. A similar but inverted U-shaped function was obtained for the escape latency measure. Escape latencies were longer on retraining than on original training at 1 h but not at 0, 4, or 24 h after original training.Intense noise has been used successfully to condition relatively simple escape and avoidance responses (Barnes & Kish, 1957; Campell, 1955). but attempts to condition more complex responses such as barpress escape or avoidance have been less successful (Barry & Harrison, 1957; Harrison & Abelson, 1959; Harrison & Tracy, 1955). The relatively modest degree of conditioning that has been reported in some situations may be a result of insufficient motivation provided by the noise stimulus (Campbell & Bloom, 1965), or to noise-elicited responses that are incompatible with the response to be conditioned (Bolles & Seelbach, 1964). This latter interpretation is similar to and consistent with Bolles (1971) analysis of the relationship between species-specific defense reactions (SSDRS) to shock and ease of conditioning. A functional similarity between noise and shock is evident in the fact that relatively simple escape and avoidance responses to shock, as is the case with noise, are rapidly conditioned, and more complex responses to shock, such as barpress escape or avoidance, as is the case with noise, are much more difficult to condition. On the other hand, shuttlebox avoidance to shock is more difficult to condition than escape or one-way avoidance and less difficult to condition than barpress escape or avoidance (Bolles, 1971). In this sense, shuttlebox avoidance appears to be of intermediate difficulty between escape and one-way avoidance conditioning and barpress conditioning.Shuttlebox avoidance using-noise as a ueshas not been reported, but if the similarity in the ease with which other responses to noise and to shock can be conditioned is more than coincidental, then shuttlebox avoidance using intense noise should be possible.The first purpose of the research to be reported was to examine shuttlebox avoidance in rats using intense Kamin (1957) reported that acquisition of an incompletely learned avoidance response to shock progresses more slowly at intermediate than at either brief or prolonged intervals after original training. Although this time-dependent U-shaped function (the Kamin effect) has been demonstrated a substantial number of times under a variety of conditions, the vast majority of replications has used shock ...

Pseudoavoidance responses in two-way avoidance learning

“…These data are consistent with those of Cicala and U1m (1971), who found that in subjects that never received shock the number of crossings from one side of a test box to the other was greater in the presence of an 80-dB white noise than in its absence. These results are not surprising because intense noise has been shown to be aversive (e.g., Campbell & Bloom, 1965) and can serve as the UCS in two-way avoidance learning (Hughes & Brett, 1976). Other data (Moltmann, 1979) suggest that the length of the CS-UCS interval may also be an important determinant of the number of PA responses.…”