Configural integration of temporal and contextual information in rats: Automated measurement in appetitive and aversive preparations

Dumigan, Natasha, Lin, Tzu-Ching Esther, Good, Mark Andrew ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1824-1203 and Honey, Robert Colin ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6870-1880 2015. Configural integration of temporal and contextual information in rats: Automated measurement in appetitive and aversive preparations. Learning & Behavior 43 (2) , pp. 179-187. 10.3758/s13420-015-0171-4

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Abstract

Two experiments investigated the capacity of rats to learn configural discriminations requiring integration of contextual (where) with temporal (when) information. In Experiment 1, during morning training sessions, food was delivered in context A and not in context B, whereas during afternoon sessions food was delivered in context B and not in context A. Rats acquired this discrimination over the course of 20 days. Experiment 2 employed a directly analogous aversive conditioning procedure in which footshock served in place of food. This procedure allowed the acquisition of the discrimination to be assessed through changes in activity to the contextual + temporal configurations (i.e., inactivity or freezing) and modulation of the immediate impact of footshock presentations (i.e., post-shock activity bursts). Both measures provided evidence of configural learning over the course of 12 days, with a final test showing that the presentation of footshock resulted in more post-shock activity in the nonreinforced than reinforced configurations. These behavioral effects reveal important parallels between (i) configural discrimination learning involving components allied to episodic memory and (ii) simple conditioning.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Psychology
Subjects:	R Medicine > RC Internal medicine > RC0321 Neuroscience. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry
Publisher:	Springer
ISSN:	1543-4494
Funders:	BBSRC
Last Modified:	28 Oct 2022 08:38
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/71580

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