Breed specific legislation: considerations for evaluating its effectiveness and recommandations for alternatives.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Aggression↗
Biomedical subjects
Jane S Orihel
Publications and source records attributed to Jane S Orihel.
Acquisition of superexcitatory properties by an irrelevant background stimulus.
Six appetitive conditioning experiments with rats demonstrated that an irrelevant X accompanying a negative patterning discrimination (XA+, XB+, XAB-) acquires extraordinarily high levels of conditioned excitation. Responding to X was similar to that evoked by 2 excitors in combination (Experiment 1) and was greater than responding to a separately reinforced Y (Experiments 2-5). Superexcitatory properties were not acquired by X in the nonpatterning discriminations of Experiments 2-4. Experiment 5 found that A and B, if anything, were weakly excitatory. Making them more strongly excitatory after conditioning did not interfere with retention of the original discrimination (Experiment 6). Results support a counterintuitive prediction of associative theories that, under carefully arranged conditions, irrelevant stimuli may acquire superexcitatory properties.
Animals↗