Operant conditioning of somatosensory evoked potential (SEP) amplitude in rats. II. Associated changes in reflex and continuous non-timelocked movements.
Animals were rewarded for increasing (uptrain) or decreasing (downtrain) the amplitude of a 30 ms surface positive component of a somatosensory evoked potential (SEP) evoked by innocuous stimulation of the spinal trigeminal tract. The reflex movement produced by the evoking stimulus had a larger amplitude in uptraining than downtraining. This change in reflex amplitude suggests that operantly conditioning SEP amplitude was correlated with a change in innocuous somatosensory activity. There was no change in continuous non-timelocked movement associated with conditioning. This latter finding suggests that SEP conditioning is not necessarily mediated by such movement.
D000818:Animals; D003216:Conditioning, Operant / Q000502:physiology*; D004558:Electric Stimulation; D005073:Evoked Potentials, Somatosensory; D009068:Movement; D009132:Muscles / Q000502:physiology; D051381:Rats; D012018:Reflex / Q000502:physiology*; D012023:Reflex, Monosynaptic; D013003:Somatosensory Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D013116:Spinal Cord / Q000502:physiology*; D013997:Time Factors; D014278:Trigeminal Nuclei / Q000502:physiology*