The Control of Responding by Sounds: Unusual Effect of Reinforcement

Abstract

Naive rats were trained to respond on one lever in the presence of noise bursts from one speaker and on a second lever in the presence of noise bursts from a second speaker. The speakers were mounted behind the levers. When responding on the lever adjacent to the sounding speaker was reinforced, control developed within fewer than five trials. When responding on the nonadjacent lever was selectively reinforced, responding on the lever adjacent to the sounding speaker increased in probability for several sessions. Naive rats were trained to respond on the nonadjacent lever following preexposure to the sound. Responding on the lever adjacent to the sounding speaker increased in probability, showing that novelty was not responsible for the effect. Naive rats were run on automaintenance procedures in which there was no explicit pairing of sound and magazine operation, 100% pairing of sound and magazine operation, or magazine operation following 40% of sound presentations. None of the rats acquired the response of approaching and sniffing the sounding speaker, indicating that sound-magazine pairing was not responsible for the effect.Key words: auditory discrimination, lever press, reinforcement, ratsMammals have evolved a number of specific abilities which enable them to acquire certain auditory discriminations readily. For example, the ability of rats and monkeys readily to discriminate the position of sounds is a function of the complexity of the spectral content of the sound (Beecher & Harrison, 1971;Brown, Beecher, Moody, & Stebbins, 1975;Harrison & Beecher, 1969;Harrison & Briggs, 1977), and of the relative positions of the sound source and response sites (Downey & Harrison, 1972Harrison, Downey, Segal, & Howe, 1971;Harrison, Iversen, & Pratt, 1977). White noise is more salient than a pure tone (Segal & Harrison, 1978), and hedgehogs, in contrast to cats and tree shrews, cannot discriminate the position of a pure tone below about 15 kHz, although such sounds are well within their range of hearing (Masterton, Thompson, Bechtold, & Robards, 1975 tory discrimination. The general approach to the problem is to find an auditory discrimination which is rapidly acquired (suggestive of specialization) and then to analyse the discrimination with respect to possible specializations which are responsible for the rapid acquisition. The discrimination of the position of sounds of complex spectral content is acquired within one or two trials (Beecher & Harrison, 1971) and is thus suitable for investigation of the special processes underlying the rapid acquisition. Rapid acquisition may depend on a special effect of reinforcement upon the response of approaching the sound source. When an animal behaviorally interacts with a sound source under natural conditions, the source must necessarily be approached. The ubiquity of the need for this approach response over the evolutionary history of the animal may be reflected in the behavioral effect of reinforcing a response in the presence of the sound. Briefly, whatever response is dif...

Isolating the incentive salience of reward-associated stimuli: value, choice, and persistence

“…For example, others that have measured multiple response types to the tone with video, including rearing/orienting and head-jerk responses, but these studies have repeatedly demonstrated that a tone CS preferentially elicits goal-tracking behavior, regardless of the relative location of the tone source to the food magazine (Holland 1977;Harrison 1979;Cleland and Davey 1983;Holland et al 2014;Meyer et al 2014); moreover this goal-tracking to a tone is not due to an inability of animals to localize the tone source, as sign-tracking responses to a tone are subject to reinforcement (Harrison 1979;Cleland and Davey 1983). Furthermore, under the present conditions, neither localizability nor stimulus modality of the reward-associated stimulus alone appear to be defining features necessary for sign-tracking, as a nosepoke stimulus that shared the visual modality and location of the lever produced predominant goal-tracking behavior (see Fig.…”

“…Interestingly, there is also a large literature demonstrating that pairing different stimuli (e.g., levers or tones) with reward can differentially induce signand goal-tracking. For example, pairing a tone with food results in primarily goal-tracking behavior (Holland 1977;Harrison 1979;Cleland and Davey 1983;Holland et al 2014;Meyer et al 2014). Furthermore, Meyer et al (2014) demonstrated that a reward-predictive tone that elicits goal-tracking behavior maintains the same amount of conditioned reinforcement in animals prescreened as sign-trackers or goal-trackers, while the lever stimulus associated with sign-tracking was the most robust conditioned reinforcer.…”

Auditory Discrimination: The Konorski Quality‐location Effect

“…The lack of differential control of responding by the position of the speakers would be a trivial finding if the animals could not localize the speakers. That the speakers could be localized was shown as follows (Harrison, 1979(Harrison, , 1983a (Lawicka, 1969).…”

Signal-directed behavior in the rat: Interactions between the nature of the CS and the nature of the UCS

“…However, rats do not approach a localizable auditory CS paired with food; and, consistent with this finding is the fact that they do not locate food on the basis of auditory cues. Thus, this type of stimulus is ineffective in releasing components of the feeding behavior system (Cleland & Davey, 1983;Harrison, 1979). Nevertheless, auditory CSs are effective for other species.…”