Blocking in the spatial domain.
An initial series of experiments with rats in a swimming pool established that they could find a hidden platform the location of which was defined in terms of 3 or 4 landmarks and that, when trained with all 4, any subset of 3 (or even, after a sufficient number of swimming trials, 2) landmarks was sufficient to produce accurate performance. When only one landmark was present during testing, however, performance fell to chance. Two additional experiments demonstrated a significant blocking effect: If rats were first trained to locate the platform with 3 landmarks, they did not learn to use a 4th landmark added to their initial set of 3.
Rodrigo
T
T
Departament de Psicologia Bàsica, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain.
Chamizo
V D
VD
McLaren
I P
IP
Mackintosh
N J
NJ
D000818:Animals; D001522:Behavior, Animal / Q000502:physiology*; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D051381:Rats