Trial and intertrial durations in Pavlovian conditioning: issues of learning and performance

Four experiments assessed the effects of trial (T) and intertrial (I) durations on magazine approach behavior in rats. In Experiments 1 and 2, different groups of animals were conditioned with various combinations of I and T durations. The rate of acquisition, in terms of the number of trials required to reach various acquisition criteria, generally was faster in groups trained with large I:T ratios. There also were differences in rate of acquisition and terminal response rates between groups trained with identical I:T ratios but with different absolute I and T durations. Differences evident at the end of conditioning persisted during a common test with various combinations of I and T durations. Experiments 3 and 4 provided a more specific test of the predictions of 2 general classes of theories and found results that were consistent with those theories that characterize group differences as indicative of differences in learning, rather than in performance.