Cueing properties of the decrease of white noise intensity for avoidance conditioning in cats

Abstract

In the main experiment two groups of 6 cats each were trained in active bar-pressing avoidance to a CS consisting of either a 10 dB or 20 dB decrease of the background white noise of 70 dB intensity. The two groups did not differ in rapidity of learning, however cats trained to the greater change .in background noise performed avoidance responses with shorter latencies than did cats trained to smaller change. Within-groups comparisons of cumulative distributions of response latencies for consecutive Vincentized fifths of avoidance acquisition showed the greatest changes in the region of latencies longer than the median latency of instrumental responses. On the other hand, the effects of CS intensity found in between-groups comparisons were located in the region of latencies shorter than the median latency of either group. Comparisons with data obtained in a complementary experiment employing additional 17 cats showed that subjects trained to stimuli less intense than the background noise level were marked by an exceptionally low level of avoidance responding with latencies shorter than 1.1 s, which was lower than expected from the probability of intertrial responses for this period of time. Due to this property of stimuli less intense than the background, the distributions of response latencies were moved to the right, in effect, prefrontal lesions influenced a greater part of latency distributions than in cats trained to stimuli more intense than the background.