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J., and Mittleman, G., Reinforcer magnitude and progressive ratio responding in the rat: effects of increased effort, prefeeding and extinction. Learn. Motiv., 24, 303, 1993. 111. Dunnett, S. B. and Everitt, B. J., Topographic factors affecting the functional viability of dopamine-rich grafts in the neostriatum, in Cell Transplantation for Neurological Disorders, T.B. Freeman, J.H. Kordower, Eds., Humana Press, Totowa, NJ, 1998, 135. 0704/C13/frame Page 229 Monday, July 17, 2000 5:33 PM © 2001 by CRC Press LLC © 2001 by CRC Press LLC 14 Chapter Use of Autoshaping with Non-Delayed and Delayed Reinforcement for Studying Effects upon Acquisition and Consolidation of Information Sheldon B. Sparber Contents I. Introduction and Overview A. Choice of Autoshaping as a Behavioral Assay B. Wrongful Expectations of Simple, Linear Dose-Response Relationships C. Vasopressin and Enhanced Cognition or Arousal? D. Trimethyltin Neurobehavioral Toxicity and the Learning-Performance Distinction E. Effects of Pharmacological Manipulations Upon Performance: Problems of Interpretation F. Physostigmine and Autoshaping: Examples of Hypotheses Testing, Complex Experimental Design, and Data Analyses II. Materials and Methods 0704/C14/frame Page 231 Monday, July 17, 2000 5:36 PM Use of Autoshaping with Non-Delayed and Delayed Reinforcement 233 autoshaped behavior is primarily a classically conditioned behavior, an instrumen- tally conditioned behavior, a bridge between the two (S-R vs. R-S contingencies) or a new class of behavior with components of each, can be gleaned from the many chapters in the book edited by Locurto, Terrace and Gibbon 3 entitled Autoshaping and Conditioning Theory . Although the majority of studies dealing with the phenomenon of autoshaping have used a procedure whereby delivery of reinforcers was not contingent upon a specified response, my own laboratory has taken advantage of the automaticity and lack of experimenter-induced bias conveyed by autoshaping and we too have utilized a response-contingent component whereby the subject (normally a rat but we, as others 4 have, used autoshaping with chickens as well) is given the opportunity to manipulate its environment (e.g., touching the extended lever, initiating its retraction earlier than programmed to do so noncontingently) leading to the delivery of a reinforcing stimulus (e.g., food) slightly sooner than its delivery in the absence of an operant (lever touch) response. For protocols we generally use, the subject cannot earn more reinforcers during a daily session in which 12 to 30 or more trials are presented and their session lengths cannot be shortened by more than a fraction, thereby most likely obviating a shortened session length as a reinforcing outcome (i.e., trials without an autoshaped response typically are comprised of the presenta- tion of a retractable lever for 15 s, followed by retraction and either immediate delivery of a reinforcing stimulus or delaying the reinforcer for up to 8 or 9 s) followed by a random or fixed time ITI, typically averaging 45 s. By introducing a delay of reinforcement we believe we have introduced a so-called working memory component as a variation of the task and this has enabled us to demonstrate selective and specific effects of neurotoxic insults to the hippocampus and associated struc- tures ( vide infra ). As is often the case, behavioral toxicologists, behavioral pharmacologists and psychopharmacologists borrow procedures and protocols from the experimental and cognitive psychologists and because of their training and reliance upon concepts like dose-response relationships, often discover a need to systematically manipulate antecedent and consequential variables which had not previously been carried out adequately by others. Likewise, it may be necessary to modify the typical physical environment used by others so that drug-behavior studies can be carried out in such a manner that ancillary measures of unconditioned behaviors can also be recorded concurrently, either automatically or via closed circuit television monitors and video recorders for later off-line analyses. Because this contribution is for a book recommending and describing methods, I have chosen to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the variations of autoshaping procedures we have used over the past 25 years. I have also included comments on theoretical and philosophical issues, where apparently appropriate, and discussions or comments about the technology used and choice of data collec- tion, reduction, and statistical analyses. The last points are not especially restricted to autoshaping as a behavioral paradigm, or to behavioral neuroscience in particular, but are important enough for a few comments at the outset because it has been my experience, in common with some colleagues, that as technological advances have enabled us to collect more 0704/C14/frame Page 233 Monday, July 17, 2000 5:36 PM © 2001 by CRC Press LLC © 2001 by CRC Press LLC 234 Methods of Behavior Analysis in Neuroscience and more data, at faster rates, not enough attention has been paid to the importance of experimental design, how the voluminous data will be handled once they are collected and the validity or appropriateness of whichever statistical analytical pro- cedures are used. In my laboratory this is a continuing, evolutionary process and we continue attempting to devise/design experiments which enable us to rely upon pre- planned statistical contrasts. To the credit of most psychologists and behavioral neuroscientists, at least reasonable attempts at dealing with these issues are more commonplace than has been my experience when attempting to interact or collab- orate with colleagues of a more reductionist persuasion. I have, on more than a few occasions, asked a colleague who points to the obviously more intense band or spot on a gel or chromatogram, derived from a single experiment (single subject’s or pooled tissue) that it is also obvious (at least living in the midwestern plains of the U.S.) that the world is flat. All one has to do is to look out of the window to confirm it. Of equally great concern (frustration?) is trying to convince a colleague that 5 to 10 experiment(s) carried out with xenopus oocytes expressing one or another recep- tor, but upon oocytes derived from a single female frog, is nothing more than one experiment with 5 to 10 replications and that standard parametric or nonparametric statistical analytical procedures designed for independent observations from indi- viduals (or parts thereof), randomly assigned to one or another treatment condition, are not appropriate, even if he/she is willing to consider using such statistical contrasts. Over the years we have used variations of autoshaped behavior acquisition and/or maintenance to study the actions of drugs or toxins upon this class of behavior(s) in mature experimental subjects, either exposed to a drug or toxin insult during development (e.g., in ovo [chick] or in utero [rat] ) or after exposure to drugs, withdrawal from them or exposure to toxins postnatally, at a more mature age. Other laboratories have followed our lead and have used identical or similar protocols to study the autoshaped acquisition of intravenous cocaine self-admin- istration, 5 to study the effects of experimenter-administered cocaine upon autoshaped behavior acquisition, 6 and to study effects of pyrogens/cytokines, which reportedly specifically disrupt or interfere with acquisition of food-rein- forced autoshaped behavior based upon the fact that the same behavior, once established, was not affected by the same treatment. 7 It has been the policy of my laboratory to attempt to give something back to the discipline from which we have borrowed theoretical and/or methodological underpinnings. I believe our contributions in this regard can be gleaned to some extent from the publication list appended to this chapter. Thus, I have chosen to emphasize some of the ways we have devised to maximize the use of autoshaped behavior in order to control for as many potential confounding variables which can interfere with design, implementation, and, most importantly, the interpretation of data derived from such studies. Almost of necessity, it is a quasi-chronology of the evolution of protocols currently in use in my laboratory (and those of colleagues who have asked for advice or patterned their work from one or more of our publications in which autoshaped behavior was one of the protocols we utilized). 0704/C14/frame Page 234 Monday, July 17, 2000 5:36 PM © 2001 by CRC Press LLC © 2001 by CRC Press LLC [...]... lever touches during the intertrial and delay of reinforcement intervals are typically recorded for each session Lever touches, when the lever is retracted (intertrial and reinforcement delay intervals) consist mainly of © 2001 by CRC Press LLC © 2001 by CRC Press LLC 0704/C14/frame Page 2 48 Monday, July 17, 2000 5:36 PM 2 48 Methods of Behavior Analysis in Neuroscience nose-poking behavior, although... Autoshaping Sessions 1 to 13 Treatment Session 1 Sessions 2–3 Sessions 4–7 Sessions 8 12 Session 13 Cg/D13ga Saline Saline Saline Saline 0.2 mg/kg D1G 0.2 mg/kg 0.2 mg/kg 0.2 mg/kg 0.067 mg/kg Saline HCG 0.2 mg/kg 0.2 mg/kg 0.2 mg/kg 0.067 mg/kg Saline PSGb 0.2 mg/kg 0.2 mg/kg 0.2 mg/kg 0.067 mg/kg Saline D4G Saline Saline 0.2 mg/kg 0.067 mg/kg Saline D8G Saline Saline Saline 0.2 mg/kg Saline a Control... experimental tool continues to this day A National Library of Medicine-Medline search, using trimethlytin and toxicity as index terms, brought up 229 citations, with about half appearing between 1990–1999 The learning-performance distinction or conundrum is all too often casually dispensed with, being considered less and less these days as investigators unschooled in behavioral neuroscience attempt... by refraining from engaging in lever-directed behaviors, having learned about the irrelevance of the lever.34 The rats treated with the high doses of TMT continue to engage in lever-directed exploratory behaviors, indicative of a reduced ability to learn to suppress behaviors toward stimuli which ordinarily should have lost their saliency or novelty.20 The divergent autoshaped lever touch behavioral... nontoxic doses of CH3Hg without the potential for introducing an experimenter bias by hand-shaping operant behavior during the learning phase Secondly, we were interested in determining if there were critical or sensitive periods during development when such exposure caused behavioral dysfunctional effects Lastly, we wanted to determine if autoshaping acquisition or performance, alone or upon a psychopharmacological... discussed in detail elsewhere,20,31,32 the dose-effect relationship between TMT and neurochemical or learning-performance variables is anything but linear or quasi-linear What we had concluded by the end of the 1 980 s was that doses of TMT that had the greatest effect upon binding of 3H-corticosterone to hippocampal cytosolic receptors interfered most with acquisition of autoshaping with a working memory... to sessions 1 and 2, the control group (CG/D13G) and the D4G and D8G were injected with saline The rats in the group injected with physostigmine while in their home cages (HCG) were injected with saline after their autoshaping sessions and the group injected with physostigmine after (post) autoshaping sessions (PSG) was injected with saline before the sessions For a more complete description of the experimental... Methods of Behavior Analysis in Neuroscience 254 50 D Session 8 Strip Touches 40 30 20 10 † 0 CG/D13G D8G D4G D1G HCG PSG Treatment Group FIGURE 14.1 (Continued) compared to the CG/D13G’s 9.11 ELT during Session 8, the D8G’s performance was significantly depressed only during Session 8 Thereafter, the D8G level of performance (ELTs) was not different from that of the CG/D13G As stated above, the group injected... Autoshaping with Non-Delayed and Delayed Reinforcement 255 Extended Lever Touches/12 Trials A CG/D13G 12 D1G 10 D4G D8G 8 6 4 ** * ** ** * * ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** 2 * 0 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Autoshaping Session FIGURE 14.2 Extended lever touches (ELT) during autoshaping sessions All groups were injected with 2 doses of saline or saline and 0.2 mg physostigmine/kg until Session 8, after... taken into account is the inverted U-shaped function often associated with drug studies on learning or memory, and the possible reason for the descending arm of the dose-effect curves, even if there is some evidence of learning enhancement If “high” doses of a drug like physostigmine are toxic (i.e., would fall on the descending arm of an inverted dose-effect curve) and, by definition, punishing in relation . Function in the Rat 227 58. Ljungberg, T. and Ungerstedt, U., Sensory inattention produced by 6-hydroxydopam- ine-induced degeneration of ascending dopamine neurons in the brain. Exp. Neurol., 53, 585 ,. mg/kg Saline D4G Saline Saline 0.2 mg/kg 0.067 mg/kg Saline D8G Saline Saline Saline 0.2 mg/kg Saline a Control Group injected once, prior to the 13th session. b Physostigmine injected post-sessions. 0704/C14/frame. of Behavior Analysis in Neuroscience 77. Dunnett, S. B. and Iversen, S. D., Learning impairments following selective kainic acid-induced lesions within the neostriatum of rats. Behav. Brain Res.,