Effect of amount of preconditioning training upon the magnitude of sensory preconditioning.

Abstract

Used 72 cats who were given different numbers of preconditioning trials of a 6-sec. tone and 2-sec. light. After avoidance conditioning was established to the light, tests of cross-modal stimulus generalization to the tone were made as measures of sensory preconditioning. There is an increase in sensory preconditioning as trials increase from 1 to about 4 and then a decrease. After this decrease the function is in question. Since the hypothesis that amount of sensory preconditioning increases as a function of number of preconditioning trials must be rejected, sensory preconditioning must be a different kind of phenomenon from standard conditioning. The theoretical considerations of this viewpoint are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)