Alleviating nausea and emesis by Pavlovian conditioning.
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Animals↗
Biomedical subjects
V A Davey
Publications and source records attributed to V A Davey.
Observational learning in children with Down syndrome and developmental delays: the effect of presentation speed in videotaped modelling.
Children with severe developmental delays (three with Down syndrome and three with autism as the primary diagnosis) observed a videotaped model performing two basic dressing skills without prompting, verbal or otherwise, or explanation by an instructor. In a within-subjects design, dressing skills that were presented at a relatively slow presentation speed through videotaped modelling were eventually performed better than those presented at a relatively fast speed. These data in combination with evidence from this laboratory that passive modelling of basic skills is more effective than interactive modelling (e.g., Biederman, Fairhall, Raven, & Davey, 1998; Biederman, Davey, Ryder, & Franchi, 1994; Biederman, Ryder, Davey, & Gibson, 1991) suggest that standard instructional techniques warrant reexamination both from the basis of instructional effectiveness and the efficient use of the allotment of teacher time.
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Teaching basic skills to children with Down syndrome and developmental delays: the relative efficacy of interactive modeling with social rewards for benchmark achievements and passive observation.
In interventions attempting to remediate deficiencies in the skills repertoire of developmentally delayed children, no less than in medical interventions, it may be fairly said that less is more. That is, the instructor should intervene as little as possible both from the perspective of efficient instructional practice and from time allotment concerns which modern classrooms face. Evidence from this laboratory has indicated that in skills training for children with severe developmental delays the passive observation of a model demonstrating the target skill is more effective than interactive modeling involving hand-over-hand instruction with verbal prompting. We have considered the role of verbal prompting in interactive modeling and have found that prompts intended to provide typical social reinforcers are counterproductive (e.g., Biederman, Davey, Ryder, & Franchi, 1994). The present study examines the efficacy of hand-over-hand modeling with response-contingent verbal prompts. In such instruction, tasks are divided into identifiable sequential components, and the achievement of each component is marked by the delivery of some form of verbal prompt. In a within-subjects design, children were trained in one skill with response-contingent verbal prompts and in a second skill with simple passive observation. A separate group of children were trained with less rigorous verbal prompting in one skill and with passive observation in a second. Consistent with previous research, we found that passive modeling was overall significantly more effective than hand-over-hand modeling and moreover that passive modeling was significantly more effective than hand-over-hand modeling with response-contingent prompting. Our evidence therefore indicates that current classroom practice in training basic skills to children with severe developmental delays may require reassessment in that simple observation of modeled skills appears to be more effective than more labor-intensive instruction.
Achievement↗
Conditioned antisickness: indirect evidence from rats and direct evidence from ferrets that conditioning alleviates drug-induced nausea and emesis.
In a direct test of conditioned antisickness (CAS; B. T. Lett, 1983) theory, the authors measured emesis in ferrets and found those with a history of forward pairings of pentobarbital and lithium to have fewer and shorter bouts of emesis on test, whether induced by lithium or, in a subsequent test, by the highly emetogenic anticancer drug cisplatin. In an indirect test of her CAS theory, B. T. Lett (1992) paired interoceptive (drug) or place cues with lithium chloride toxicosis and found that rats with a forward-pairings history ate less food than controls on a forward-pairing test, consistent with conditioned sickness rather than CAS. But rats eat dirt or clay in response to sickness and adaptively eat small amounts of food when clay is not available. We substituted clay (kaolin) for food in a partial procedural replication of B. T. Lett's (1992, Experiment 1) experiment and found that rats with a history of forward pairings of pentobarbital and lithium ate less kaolin, which is consistent with CAS.
Animals↗
Conditioned antisickness: heat as an internal stimulus in conditioning taste aversion and aversion failure in rats.
Heat was found to be effective as a conditional stimulus in the aversion failure procedure (S. Revusky, H. K. Taukulis, L. A. Parker, & S. Coombes, 1979) and was also found to be effective as an unconditional stimulus using a taste aversion procedure in which rats exposed to high ambient temperature following saccharin consumption showed robust saccharin aversions relative to unpaired and unheated controls. The antisickness and taste aversion conditioning evidence force reexamination of the view that toxic heat effects are referred to the external environment. Together with other recent evidence from this laboratory, these data support the hypothetical antisickness mechanism of aversion failure, which requires that toxic heat serve as an internal stimulus.
Animals↗
The effect of caloric restriction on lipofuscin accumulation in mouse brain with age.
Caloric restriction (CR), has been shown to extend average and maximum lifespan in rodents and other animals as well as to delay a wide variety of manifestations of aging. The purpose of this study was to further elucidate the relationship between lipofuscin (LF) accumulation and the aging process by examining the effect of lifelong CR on LF accumulation in brain cells. Specifically, 1) we include age groups of CR (CR1 approximately equal to 90 kcal/wk and CR2 approximately equal to 58 kcal/wk) and ad libidum fed (AL; approximately 120 kcal/wk) mice including groups at maximum lifespan; 2) CR was the major dietary manipulation; 3) LF was identified using EM; 4) LF was quantified by areal measurement; and 5) the results were analyzed by inferential statistics. We have found that 1) LF increased with age and 2) that animals in the CR2 group had significantly less overall LF in the perikarya of the granule cells of the dentate gyrus when compared to CR1 or AL animals at equivalent ages. In addition, CR2 mice at maximum lifespan (45 mo.) had slightly less LF than did CR1 or AL mice at their maximum lifespans (36 mo.). Our results clearly demonstrate that CR (at 52%, but not 25% of AL diet) retards the overall accumulation of LF with time and, further, suggest that LF accumulation is not simply a linear function of age.
Aging↗
Antisickness conditioning using a nausea-producing nondrug cue.
Most drugs induce conditioned taste aversions and are therefore commonly supposed to produce nausea or sickness. Paradoxically, some drugs appear to lose induction capability when made to serve as a cue for a second drug that produces more severe sickness, perhaps through selective association with a hypothetical homeostatic or antisickness aftereffect of sickness. Using drug-drug pairings had made antisickness conditioning theory difficult to validate. We report here that rotation serves in lieu of a drug cue in rats. Rotation-drug pairings eliminate drug interactions and enable the sorts of parametric manipulations required to validate the theory. By postulating a common sickness mechanism to explain both taste aversion and aversion failure, the theory places the phenomenon within an adaptive evolutionary framework. Successful application could yield a direct countermeasure to severe nausea in clinical settings.
Animals↗
Methodological issues in drug-drug conditioning in rats: nonassociative factors in heart rate and avfail.
Sodium pentobarbital injections followed 30 min later by d-amphetamine sulfate produce an effect over trials in the form of an increase in heart rate in response to pentobarbital in relation to rats that receive the 2 drugs 24 hr apart (long-delayed control: Revusky, Davey, & Zagorski, 1989). This study found equivalent increases in heart rate in forward and backward groups in relation to a long-delayed control regardless of whether training or testing was carried out in a heart rate recording apparatus or in the home cage, which suggests that a drug interaction due to drug administrations in forward and backward groups has yet to be eliminated in accounting for the heart rate effect. Comparison of backward and long-delayed controls in a drug-drug procedure that used a taste aversion test revealed that both forward and delayed pairings can produce attenuated aversions in relation to a backward group regardless of whether the unconditional stimulus is amphetamine (Experiment 1) or lithium chloride (Experiment 2).
Animals↗