Habituation of Exploratory Behavior in Rats - Conditioning and Learning in Psychology

This process is called habituation, when infants appear to create a neural model or internal representation that can later be used as a basis for comparisons. Stimuli discrepant from the habituated neural model usually trigger enhanced responses, or dishabituation. A stimulus perceived as novel requires more cognitive processing than a familiar one. Over the course of habituation, there is a shift from a familiarity preference to a novelty preference. Habituation is considered a basic form of learning that has been observed in a broad range of species. Moreover,

The subjects were either given a placebo or a moderate dose of caffeine; three different memory tasks were then conducted. Though the results showed no evidence that caffeine had an effect on memory, it showed that performance levels were better when subjects had been exposed to caffeine (Kelemen & Creeley, 2001). With the information for previous experiments, the basis of this experiment was formatted. The current study, like the previous, also looks at the effect that exposure to caffeine can have on the test subject’s performance. The whole experiment is divided into two parts, experiment 1 and experiment 2. The first portion of the experiment looks at the difference between training planaria to turn around in two different conditions. The planaria were either trained to approach the light or avoid the light by using the positive punishment of blowing puffs of air at the heads of the planaria until they turned around. The second portion of the experiment used the same training conditions as the first portion but looked at the effect the exposure to caffeine had on the planaria, specifically, the number of trials that were conducted to get the planaria to turn around on their own. The experiment was then conducted after forming two hypotheses, one for experiment 1 and one for experiment 2, to use as a guideline. Based on the current knowledge about planaria and their natural habitat, it can be hypothesized for experiment 1 that it will require fewer trials for

Male AP+ Tg Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats weighing 350-450 g will be used in this study. There will be a total of 40 rats which will be divided into four groups with ten in each group. Adult DRG from C1 to L1 will be dissected from rats ≥ 8 weeks of age using standard techniques.

Animals with a bigger cage and more toys performed poorly on cognitive tasks compared to the control group

The hippocampus has been known to be the storage center for learning and memory in the brain (Wirsching et al., 1984). The mapping theory developed by O’Keefe and Nadel (1978) and O’Keefe and Conway (1980) proposed that there is a relationship between the hippocampus and storing spatial information, which allows animals to map out the surrounding area and locate itself in proportion to its surroundings.

They first had a controlled experiment with only food and observed their behavior for a week and a half. After that, they introduced a small board in the same area and observed the ravens’ behavior. At first, the ravens did not go near the board and it took about a month and a half to grow accustomed to the board. Once the ravens showed comfort to be near by the board, they began to add food of small and large sizes around the board and recorded the ravens’ behavior for two weeks. From there, they placed the food on the board and recorded the ravens’ behavior for another two weeks. There was a significant difference with the choices when the board was introduced. The board has changed their behavior to primarily choose the smaller pieces and the ravens that did choose the larger pieces had other ravens stealing their food instead of going to the board to get

This result shows that the four individuals observed spent most of their time during the study resting. There is a huge lack of presence of feeding and traveling

In order to provide objective measures of some characteristics of the experimental room, 61 objects in the room were rated on two dimensions: saliency and schema expectancy. The saliency rating was designed to indicate how noticeable an object was in the context of the room. Objects such as the skull and the Skinner box were high on this scale, while objects such as staples and an eraser were low. The schema-expectancy rating was intended to provide an index of subjects’ graduate-student office schema by asking how likely the object was in the context of the room. Objects such as the desk and ceiling lights were high on this scale, while objects such as a model brain and a piece of bark were

Two forms of non-associative conditioning are habituation and sensitization. Habituation involves a no US and a novel stimulus being continuously presented to the organism. Organisms will learn that the novel stimulus will not predict another stimulus after repeated occurrences, and subsequently the organism will form this in their memory and decrease or cease its response to that stimulus. This is beneficial to survival because it helps the organism filter out insignificant repetitive stimuli and therefore save energy and improve its efficiency [3]. The second form of non-associative learning is sensitization, in which a strong stimulus that is presented will increase the organism’s responses to different stimuli in the future. In other words, the organism will be more alert and have an enhanced response to the stimulus. This allows the organism to be alert of dangerous constituents in their environment [4]. Overall, non-associative learning improves selective attention and response to important stimuli which is crucial to survival and

Group A and group B were both deprived of food 24 hours before the task, but on different days. This test is based on the innate fear rats have to open spaces, but has the added component of motivation since the animals have been food deprived (Stedenfeld et al. 2011). The open field apparatus we used was (Insert dimensions), and had a layer of corncob bedding to prevent the rats from slipping on the slick floor of the apparatus. In the middle of the apparatus was a container with crushed up Harlan chow and one fruit loop on top. The rats were then put into a corner of the open field apparatus and were allowed 15 minutes to explore and eat. We recorded their latency to eat, beginning and final mass of food in container, rearing, grooming freezing, number of fecal boli pellets, and how long they took to eat once they returned to their home cage. The rat was removed from the apparatus at the end of the 15-minute trial, and was returned to its home cage. We observed the rats in their home cage until they began to

environment that the brain is developing in. The rewired ferrets, therefore, are evidence of the brain’s

This study was conducted to test the effects of extinction by viewing shaping before and after extinction. Extinction refers to a decrease of a behavior when the reinforcer is removed (Bouton, Todd, Vurbic, and Winterbauer, 2011). Extinction was formerly theorized in the Recorla-Wagner model to be a complete unlearning of a previously learned association. However, extinction has also be theorized as the retaining of learning and not the destruction of it. Using virtual rats in the CyberRat program. The current study measures the response rate during shaping before and after extinction. Operant conditioning was used to shape a rat for lever pressing with reinforcement. After the behavior was shaped, the rat went through three consecutive 60 minute sessions of extinction. When lever pressing was extinguished, rats were shaped again to lever press for reinforcement. Expecting shaping after extinction to have a shorter duration if the learning of the association is retained.

Assimilation – taking in new information from the environment through doing everyday actions (crawling, touching, rolling…)

Spatial learning and memory are very important to humans in their everyday life. It helps them remember where they parked their car, how to get from home to work, or how to get to the hospital in an emergency. It was a difficult topic to study until Richard Morris created the Morris water maze in 1981. Since then, it has become simpler to observe not only rats, but also human’s spatial learning and memory.

An example of the population coding that is presented within the paper is “place cells” within rats. We are able to use these cells to show the animals location with regards to a centred reference frame in the surrounding environment of the rat. In this experiment, they use a small maze, each area is characterized by one of these “place cells”. Within this area there is a small region of the maze that is triggered and sends a response. Through observing the rats, they saw that there was a spatial overlap between the fields and thus, they concluded that the cells would respond to any location that they are given. They also found that visual features were also encoded within these population codes, for example, orientation, colour, direction of motion, and depth. So far, it has been shown that our environmental influences effect our behaviour so heavily. Population encoding is very strongly rooted, if one cell is damaged it won’t affect the already encoded representation. Just as if one part of a computer goes, most of the time the remaining parts of the device