Interaction of retention interval with CS-preexposure and extinction treatments: symmetry with respect to primacy.
Imposition of a retention interval between cue-outcome pairings and testing can alleviate the retardation of conditioned responding induced by pretraining exposure to the cue (i.e., the CS-preexposure effect). However, recent studies have reported an enhanced effect of CS-preexposure treatment with longer retention intervals (De la Casa & Lubow, 2000, 2002; Lubow & De la Casa, 2002). In a series of conditioned barpress suppression studies with rats, we examined the effects of imposing a retention interval just prior to testing following either CS-preexposure (cue alone before cue-outcome pairings) or extinction (cue alone after cue-outcome pairings) treatments. Experiment 1 replicated in a different preparation recent reports of CS-preexposure treatment effects increasing with longer retention intervals. Experiment 2 showed that spontaneous recovery of stimulus control of behavior after extinction can be obtained with the same parameters as those used to observe the augmented effect of CS-preexposure treatment. In Experiment 3, both the augmented effect of CS-preexposure treatment and spontaneous recovery from extinction were found when we used, in place of a retention interval, an associative priming manipulation.
Wheeler
Daniel S
DS
State University of New York, Binghamton, New York 13902-6000, USA.
Stout
Steven C
SC
Miller
Ralph R
RR
D000818:Animals; D003214:Conditioning, Classical; D005108:Extinction, Psychological; D005260:Female; D008297:Male; D051381:Rats; D017207:Rats, Sprague-Dawley; D012055:Reinforcement Schedule; D015203:Reproducibility of Results