Biomedical subjects

R A Bevins

Publications and source records attributed to R A Bevins.

24 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

PubMed1996

Conditioned stimulus determinants of conditioned response form in Pavlovian fear conditioning.

Four experiments using barpress conditioned suppression in rats found that tone evoked more freezing (immobility) than did light. Still, tone and light appeared to have similar conditioned value as assessed by suppression in Experiments 1, 2, and 3, and by blocking, second-order conditioning, and overconditioning assays in Experiments 1, 2, and 3, respectively. Experiment 4 arranged for tone to evoke less suppression than light but more freezing. Results suggest that in fear conditioning, the nature of the conditioned stimulus affects the form of conditioned responding (strong vs. weak freezing). This conclusion extends one drawn by P. C. Holland (1977) on the basis of his work in appetitive conditioning.

Animals↗

PubMed1994

A deficit in one-trial context fear conditioning is not due to opioid analgesia.

Rats given a foot shock immediately after placement in a box subsequently freeze (immobility) much less in that box than rats given the same shock 2 min after placement. A possible explanation of this result is that these two procedures might induce different levels of opioid analgesia at the time of shock. Opioids might be present immediately after handling, transporting, and exposure to a new situation, but absent 2 min later. Two experiments examined this possibility by giving the opioid antagonist naloxone before conditioning (Experiment 1) or before conditioning and testing (Experiment 2). There was no effect of naloxone relative to saline controls. The results do not support the analgesia hypothesis. Experiment 2 precludes a stage-dependent learning account of the results.

Analgesia↗

PubMed1993

Extending continuous versus discontinuous conditioned stimuli before versus after unconditioned stimuli.

Conditioned suppression was used with rats to study the effects of extending conditioned stimuli (CSs) before versus after the delivery of unconditioned stimuli. These extensions are termed B and A extensions, respectively. Within-group designs were used to compare the effects of extending CSs when 2-min parts of those CSs were separated by temporal gaps of 6 min versus a separation of no gap. The results were as follows: (a) B extensions weakened conditioning more than did A extensions, with or without gaps; (b) under some conditions, this asymmetrical effect persisted with extended training; (c) gaps between 2-min parts of a B extension had no detectable effect; and (d) under some parameter values, gaps between 2-min parts of an A extension weakened conditioning significantly. These results are better predicted by the Sometimes Opponent-Process model (SOP; A. R. Wagner, 1981) than by the Rescorla-Wagner-Frey-Sears real-time model (J. J. B. Ayres, M. Albert, & J. C. Bombace, 1987).

Animals↗

PubMed1992

One-trial backward excitatory fear conditioning transfers across contexts.

One path to human phobia may be one-trial backward fear conditioning. Human phobias transfer readily across contexts. However, animal studies of one-trial backward fear conditioning have yet to demonstrate such transfer. The present study sought to do so. It used a lick-suppression procedure with 84 naive male albino rats. Two conditioning contexts, designated O and V, were crossed factorially with two test contexts, O and V. Within each cell of the factorial design, rats received in the conditioning context either a single 12 sec tone backward paired with a single 4 sec 1 mA shock or the same tone explicitly unpaired with shock. Fear of context and fear of tone were subsequently assessed in terms of the suppression of licking that they evoked. Test results suggested that (1) the rats discriminated between contexts O and V, and (2) despite such discrimination, one-trial backward fear conditioning transferred across the two contexts. The results enhance the plausibility of one-trial backward fear conditioning as a source of human phobia.

Animals↗

PubMed1990

Serial conditioning as a function of stimulus, response, and temporal dependencies.

Six experiments were used to examine the effects of explicit response, stimulus, and temporal dependencies on responding in an interfood interval. The first two experiments demonstrated that 10-segment 60-s interfood clocks controlled similar distributions of key pecking in pigeons regardless of whether response-reinforcement contiguity was required, allowed, or precluded. The third and fourth experiments found that in the absence of an explicit response-reinforcement dependency, systematic explicit stimuli in an interfood interval were sufficient to establish and maintain the characteristic distribution of key pecking and that an interval without an explicit clock failed to establish or maintain key pecking. The last two experiments demonstrated that the interfood interval need not be of fixed length, and that a simple correlation of stimuli with increments from either a minimum to a maximum imminency or probability of food presentation controlled behavior in a similar manner. Successively higher rates generally occurred to successively later stimuli in the upper half of the range.

Journal Article↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Chronic caffeine exposure in rats blocks a subsequent nicotine-conditioned taste avoidance in a one-bottle, but not a two-bottle test.

Two experiments were conducted in order to investigate nicotine-conditioned taste avoidance (CTA) following chronic preexposure to caffeine. Rats were given daily intraperitoneal injections of caffeine anhydrous (0, 10, or 30 mg/kg) for 10 or 30 days. Training of the nicotine-CTA began after the last day of caffeine preexposure. On five separate occasions access to a saccharin solution was followed immediately by an injection of 1.2 mg/kg nicotine hydrogen tartrate salt or saline. Nicotine-CTA readily developed in saline-preexposed controls. That is, paired rats drank less saccharin solution than unpaired rats after repeated saccharin-nicotine pairings. A similar pattern of nicotine-CTA was found for rats preexposed to 30 mg/kg caffeine for 10 days. Following 10 days of preexposure to 10 mg/kg caffeine, however, CTA did not develop under standard testing conditions. Thirty days of caffeine preexposure did not affect the development of a nicotine-CTA even though the anorexic effects of caffeine were evident after exposure to 30 mg/kg for this duration. Thus, caffeine exposure appears to weaken acquisition or expression of the conditioned avoidance properties of nicotine. This effect is sensitive to the dose of caffeine and duration of preexposure. Importantly, the pattern of nicotine-CTA does not appear to be due to nonspecific effects of caffeine.

Animals↗