The contribution of within-session averaging of drug- and vehicle-appropriate responding to the graded dose-response function in drug discrimination learning.
Prior work within the taste aversion baseline of drug discrimination learning has demonstrated that the generalization function for individual rats is graded in nature. In such work, intermediate doses of the training drug produced intermediate levels of drug-appropriate responding. Under some conditions, such graded responding has been reported to be due to an averaging of quantal drug- and vehicle-appropriate responding at different periods within the session. The present experiment assessed the contribution of such averaging to the graded responding within the aversion design. Rats were first trained to discriminate either 1mg/kg naloxone or 10mg/kg pentobarbital from distilled water. They were then administered various doses of the training drug (or a different drug), and the within-session pattern of licking was monitored minute by minute over the 20min session. Responding within the session was primarily either drug- or vehicle-appropriate. The specific pattern of drug- or vehicle-appropriate responding was presumably dependent upon the onset and/or offset of the drug stimulus. Thus, for the aversion baseline the graded response function for individual rats appears to be a function of the within session averaging of quantal (either drug- or vehicle-appropriate) responding.
Psychopharmacology Laboratory, Department of Psychology, The American University, Washington, D.C. 20016, USA.
B.-F.X.
BF
Sobel
C.L.
CL
Wetherington
A.L.
AL
Riley