Instrumental responses and Pavlovian stimuli as temporal referents in a peak procedure.

ABSTRACT: Three experiments investigated whether the nature of the temporal referent affects timing behaviour in rats. We used a peak procedure and assessed timing of food well activity as a function of whether the referent was an instrumental response (a lever press that resulted in the withdrawal of the lever) or a conditioned stimulus (CS) that was 2 s in Experiment 1, 500 ms in Experiment 2, and 800 ms in Experiment 3. In all experiments, the interval between the offset of the temporal referent and food was 5 s. The curve fits for each experiment revealed no differences in peak time, but magazine responding immediately following the CS was higher than following a lever press. This pattern of results was interpreted as reflecting a combination of (a) ambiguity in which component of the 500 ms-2-s

SUBMITTER: Burgess KV 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9896268 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature