Abstract
Water-deprived adult rats were used in a conditioned-suppression-of-licking procedure to determine the effect of inhibitory training with a novel stimulus trained in simultaneous compound with a previously established conditioned inhibitor. This procedure constitutes an inhibitory analogue to the excitatory blocking procedure in classical conditioning. The conditioned-inhibition training consisted of either explicitly unpaired CS and US presentations or negative contingency training, in which the likelihood of the US was greater in the absence than in the presence of the CS, but the CS and the US were occasionally paired. To assess conditioned inhibition, a retardation test was used, and comparable retardation was obtained for subjects that were administered the blocking treatment and control subjects given similar conditioned-inhibition training with a compound stimulus in which the nontarget element was not previously established as a conditioned inhibitor.
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Support for this research was provided by NIMH Grant 33881 and NSF Grant BNS 86-00755 to Ralph R. Miller. Preparation of the manuscript was supported by a UK Science and Engineering Research Council Grant to Geoffrey Hall.
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Schachtman, T.R., Matzel, L.D. & Miller, R.R. Retardation of conditioned excitation following operational inhibitory blocking. Animal Learning & Behavior 16, 100–104 (1988). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03209050
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03209050