Ultrasound emission in infant rats as an indicant of arousal during appetitive learning and extinction

Infant rats rewarded for crawling by being allowed to suckle on the dry nipple of an anesthetized dam showed a decreasing rate of ultrasound production during acquisition and an increasing rate during extinction. These results suggest that infant rats can be stressed and are aroused as a result of successive nonrewards just as adult rats are. In addition, these results do not support the hypothesis that infant rats lack inhibitory mechanisms related to poorly developed neural centers.