Associative and postprandial control of schedule-induced drinking: Implications for the study of interim behavior

Abstract

Schedule-induced drinking and food-magazine contacts were examined in rats receiving either true- or pseudodiscriminative conditioning. Schedule-induced drinking was largely confined to S− following true discrimination training, but when SI and S2 were unrelated to food deliveries (pseudo condition), drinking occurred after food ingestion. A stimulus generalization test for drinking yielded an excitatory postdiscrimination gradient around S− after the true discrimination and a flat gradient after the pseudo discrimination. Additional observations showed S− drinking to be closely related to the amount of food consumed during the immediately preceding S+ trial. These data suggested that both the predictive feature of S− and postprandial stimuli can control schedule-induced drinking. It was argued that these variables represent two general processes—induction and selection—both of which are necessary conditions requiring further study. Magazine contacts during S+ did not distinguish the true from the pseudo condition and were not influenced by test stimuli during a generalization test.