Instrumental (or operant) conditioning, a form of animal learning, is similar to reinforcement learning (Watkins, 1989) in that it allows an agent to adapt its actions to gain maximally from the environment while only being rewarded for correct performance. But animals learn much more complicated behaviors through instrumental conditioning than robots presently acquire through reinforcement lea...

I Instrumental behavior refers to those actions whose acquisition and mainte­ nance depend on their consequences for the animal or, in others words, on the fact that the action is irzslrumClllal in causing some outcome. The func­ ,t tional significance of the capacity for instrumental action is gO obvious.as to require little comment; it is this capacity that allows us and other animals to lear...

Evaluative conditioning (EC) is a change in the evaluation of a stimulus after the stimulus co-occurred with affective stimuli. The present research examined whether EC of one stimulus depends also on the co-occurrence of another stimulus with positive or negative stimuli. We paired two target people with affective stimuli. We found that a person who appeared eight times with positive stimuli a...

Prior experimentation, making exclusive use of operant response rate, has offered conflicting evidence regarding the role of reinforcement and motor effects in neuroleptic-induced changes in operant responding. In the present work, response rate and response duration were recorded for 12 rats responding under a fixed-ratio 10 schedule of food reinforcement. On six consecutive days separate grou...

Operant response rate changes within the course of a typical free-operant experimental session. These changes are orderly, and reliably demonstrated with subjects from different species, responding under different experimental conditions. Killeen (1995) postulated that the response rate changes are a function of the interplay between arousal and satiation and offered a mathematical model for th...

Transfer of classical conditioning to operant learning was demonstrated by showing enhanced acquisition of an operant discrimination in a group of rats (n = 6) previously exposed to pairings of the discriminative stimulus with food as compared to control animals (n = 6). A group (n = 6) that received the classical conditioning sessions while under the influence of the neuroleptic, pimozide (1.0...

Learned associations between environmental stimuli and rewards drive goal-directed learning and motivated behavior. These memories are thought to be encoded by alterations within specific patterns of sparsely distributed neurons called neuronal ensembles that are activated selectively by reward-predictive stimuli. Here, we use the Fos promoter to identify strongly activated neuronal ensembles i...

BACKGROUND Rodent models of orofacial pain typically use methods adapted from manipulations to hind paw; however, limitations of these models include animal restraint and subjective assessments of behavior by the experimenter. In contrast to these methods, assessment of operant responses to painful stimuli has been shown to overcome these limitations and expand the breadth of interpretation of ...

To examine the effects of operant conditioning on stereotypic pacing in 3 female African wild dogs located at the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston, this study made recordings of pacing behavior immediately following individual sessions of husbandry training and 2 no-training conditions. The study found significant differences in the percentage of observations spent in stereotypic pacing behaviors fo...

The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between novelty-seeking behaviour and operant oral ethanol self-administration in Wistar rats. The open field and novel object test was used to assess novelty-seeking. Ethanol self-administration was initiated in an operant procedure where ethanol was introduced in the presence of sucrose. Eighteen out of 32 rats were successfully...