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Effects of a pre-aversive stimulus upon oddity performance in monkeys
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior
|January 1, 1968
Summary
Monkeys performing oddity discrimination showed suppressed responding to a tone-shock, but maintained their discrimination accuracy. This suggests cognitive tasks are resilient to aversive stimuli in primates.
Area of Science:
- Behavioral neuroscience
- Primate cognition
Background:
- Oddity discrimination is a key cognitive task for assessing perceptual abilities.
- Understanding how aversive stimuli impact complex behaviors is crucial in neuroscience.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the effects of aversive stimuli (tone-shock) on established oddity discrimination performance in non-human primates.
- To determine if response suppression during aversive conditioning interferes with cognitive task execution.
Main Methods:
- Two rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) were trained on an automated oddity discrimination task with patterned stimuli.
- A conditioned aversive stimulus (tone followed by electric shock) was introduced during ongoing task performance.
- Response rates and discrimination accuracy were measured under varying shock intensities.
Main Results:
- Baseline responding was partially suppressed during the tone-shock, particularly at higher intensities (2-3 mA).
- Discrimination performance remained largely unaffected despite the suppression of overall responding.
- Cognitive performance on the oddity task demonstrated resilience to the aversive conditioning procedure.
Conclusions:
- The findings suggest that established cognitive processes, like oddity discrimination in primates, are robust to the disruptive effects of aversive stimuli.
- Response suppression due to aversive conditioning does not necessarily equate to a deficit in cognitive discrimination abilities.