Attributes of an effective stimulus

The goal was to determine what attributes of a stimulus make it an effective time marker. Rats were trained on simple, appetitive, head-entry procedures in which food was available every 120 s. Ninety seconds following reinforcer delivery, a stimulus could be presented. The attributes of this stimul...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author MacInnis, Mika L. M
Format Dissertation
LanguageEnglish
Published ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01.01.2007
Subjects
Experimental psychology
Experiments
Psychological tests
Psychology
Rodents
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Summary:The goal was to determine what attributes of a stimulus make it an effective time marker. Rats were trained on simple, appetitive, head-entry procedures in which food was available every 120 s. Ninety seconds following reinforcer delivery, a stimulus could be presented. The attributes of this stimulus that were varied were probability of stimulus presentation (Experiment 1), duration (Experiments 1 and 2), intensity (Experiment 2), and the number and duration of a pulsing stimulus (Experiments 3 and 4). The results showed that the critical attribute that made the stimulus an effective time marker was the total duration of the signaled interval that was filled with the stimulus. Packet theory was used to fit the data for the mean of the individuals in each group, as well as for each of the individuals for all experiments. A simple linear combination rule accounted for the effectiveness of the stimuli. A Turing test was used to evaluate the model fits to the individual data.
ISBN:0549119825
9780549119821