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Updated: Jul 5, 2026

Visual Classical Conditioning in Wood Ants
Published on: October 5, 2018
The influence of CS-US interval on several different indices of learning in appetitive conditioning
Andrew R Delamater1, Peter C Holland
1Department of Psychology, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, Brooklyn, New York 11210, USA. andrewd@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Abstract:
Four experiments examined the effects of varying the conditioned stimulus-unconditioned stimulus (CS-US) interval (and US density) on learning in an appetitive magazine approach task with rats. Learning was assessed with conditioned response (CR) measures, as well as measures of sensory-specific stimulus-outcome associations (Pavlovian-instrumental transfer, potentiated feeding, and US devaluation). The results from these studies indicate that there exists an inverse relation between CS-US interval and magazine approach CRs, but that sensory-specific stimulus-outcome associations are established over a wide range of relatively long, but not short, CS-US intervals. These data suggest that simple CR measures provide different information about what is learned than measures of the specific stimulus-outcome association, and that time is a more critical variable for the former than latter component of learning.
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