Carbon dioxide effects on acquisition & extinction of avoidance behavior.
- 1 January 1964
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Psychological Association (APA) in Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology
- Vol. 57 (2) , 267-270
- https://doi.org/10.1037/h0044876
Abstract
Four groups of rats were anesthetized with CO2 gas at 4 different intervals following each of 15 conditioning trials; another group received partial anesthetization after each conditioning trail; and another group served as a confinement control group. The partially anesthetized group and the group anesthetized immediately after each trial were clearly inferior to all other groups in acquiring the avoidance habit. These data indicated that CO2 treatment impaired acquisition of the avoidance response either by interrupting the consolidation of the habit or by acting as a negative reinforcer for the habit. A 2nd experiment, using extinction trials followed by CO2 treatments, yielded data indicating that the CO2 treatment acted as a negative rein-forcer.Keywords
This publication has 3 references indexed in Scilit:
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- Studies of fear as an acquirable drive: I. Fear as motivation and fear-reduction as reinforcement in the learning of new responses.Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1948