Sources of Intertrial Proactive Interference in Rats' Short-Term Memory in a Delayed Successive Matching-to-Sample Modality Discrimination 1996

Cohen, and Armstrong
University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, Canada

Rats were trained on a delayed successive matching-to-stimulus modality task consisting of onset of chamber lights or a tone for the sample stimulus, S1, and a comparison stimulus, S2. Lever pressing to S1 was reinforced as was lever pressing to its matching S2 (light-light or tone-tone pairs) but not to its mismatching S2 (light-tone, tone-light pairs). The interval between S1 and S2 within a trial, the retention interval (RI), was varied between 1 and 6 s within sessions while the interval between S2 and the next S1, the intertrial interval (ITI), was reduced from 24 to 12 s and finally to 6 s over blocks of sessions. In Experiment 1, where S1 was kept at 2 s and S2 at 10 s, rats' matching accuracy declined over the longer RI, was slightly disrupted as ITIs were reduced to 6 s only over 1-s RIs, and was generally poorer to the tone than light S1. In Experiment 2, where both stimuli were 10 s increasing RIs caused steeper declines in matching accuracy to the tone S1 than light S1 and decreasing ITIs to 6 s disrupted rats performance over both RIs. Matching accuracy to the tone but not to the light S1 was also poorer when a preceding trial's S2 was a light S2 than when it was a tone S2 only during Experiment 2. This intertrial stimulus disagreement effect was not influenced by ITI duration. These results suggest that intertrial proactive interference in delayed matching tasks consists of two separate and independent processes in rats similar to those found in pigeons (Edhouse & White, 1988).

UI MeSH Term Description Entries

Related Publications

Cohen, and Armstrong
June 1998, Shinrigaku kenkyu : The Japanese journal of psychology,
Cohen, and Armstrong
April 1968, Canadian journal of psychology,
Cohen, and Armstrong
May 1973, Journal of experimental psychology,
Cohen, and Armstrong
December 1965, Psychological reports,
Cohen, and Armstrong
September 2006, Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior,
Cohen, and Armstrong
April 2004, Journal of experimental psychology. Animal behavior processes,
Cohen, and Armstrong
October 1988, Journal of experimental psychology. Animal behavior processes,
Cohen, and Armstrong
September 2015, Hearing research,
Copied contents to your clipboard!