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Acquisition of conditioned responding in a multiple schedule depends on the reinforcement's temporal contingency with

Lorenzo Morè1, Greg Jensen

  • 1Molecular Genetics of Mental Retardation Unit, Department of Biotechnologies, Dulbecco Telethon Institute at the San Raffaele Scientific Institute, 20132 Milano, Italy.

Learning & Memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.)
|April 17, 2014
PubMed

Forty mice acquired conditioned responses to stimuli presented in a multiple schedule with variable inter-trial intervals (ITIs). In some trials, reinforcement was preceded by a variable conditioned stimulus (CS), while other trials were reinforced following distinctive fixed-duration CS. A third stimulus was presented but never paired with reinforcement. Subjects in five groups experienced ITIs of different durations. Acquisition of responding to each stimulus depended only on the cycle-to-trial ratio (C/T), and thus on the temporal contingency of each stimulus. Acquisition was unaffected by whether CSs were of fixed or variable duration.

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