Olfactory discrimination, reversal learning, and stimulus control in rats.

Abstract

Conducted 3 experiments with a total of 21 Wistar rats. In Exp I Ss were trained to discriminate lights, tones, or odors and then given a series of discrimination reversals. Only Ss trained with odors showed positive transfer on the first reversal and acquisition of a reversal set. Other experiments demonstrated that (a) Ss preferentially attended to odors when presented in compound with lights or tones; (b) odors exerted more discriminative control than tones in tests using compound stimuli of competing sign; and (c) after pretraining on the positive stimulus, acquisition of an odor but not a light discrimination occurred with virtually no errors. These results demonstrate the importance of stimulus modality in the establishment of stimulus control and the need for more careful analysis of stimulus factors in cross-species comparisons of learning ability. (22 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)