Ontogenesis of learning: I. Variation in the rat's reflexive and learned responses to gustatory stimulation.
These experiments indicate that by Day 15 after birth, the processes that mediate a number of taste-controlled behaviors in the rat are functional. These include the sensory processes necessary to detect and respond reflexively to sucrose, the event-learning processes that reduce the rat's neophobic reaction to sucrose, and the integrative-learning processes that enable it to learn an aversion to sucrose when paired with lithium toxicosis, even when these events are separated by 1 hr. These capacities, however, did not emerge simultaneously. Those necessary to detect and respond reflexively to sucrose emerged prior to those that contribute to the learned control of taste-guided behaviors. It is argued that these age-related dissociations in behavioral capacities reflect a caudal-to-rostral maturational sequence of components of the ascending gustatory system that are thought to underlie these capacities.
D000367:Age Factors; D000818:Animals; D001522:Behavior, Animal / Q000502:physiology; D003214:Conditioning, Classical / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D011897:Random Allocation; D051381:Rats / Q000502:physiology*; D013395:Sucrose / Q000494:pharmacology; D013649:Taste / Q000502:physiology*
D013395:Sucrose