The role of irrelevant drive stimuli in learning.

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
This expt. was designed to test the hypothesis that only drive stimuli which are themselves reduced become connected to a rewarded response. The 1st expt. required white rats on the basis of hunger or thirst drives to learn to push either 1 of 2 panels to remove a noxious stimulus. Ten of 11 animals learned this discrimination. In a 2nd test of the same hypothesis rats were tested in a T-maze while under either a single drive (hunger or thirst) or simultaneous hunger and thirst. After an initial training period the rats were required to reverse the spatial habit by learning, to go to the previously unrewarded side of the T-maze. The results indicated that the groups run under conditions of simultaneous hunger and thirst were considerably retarded in learning a reversal of the spatial response. These results indicate that the stimulus condition accompanying a drive state becomes associated with the learned response although the drive state is not itself rewarded.
Keywords

This publication has 1 reference indexed in Scilit: