Disruption and Recovery of the Orienting Response Following Shock or Context Change in Preweanling Rats

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Previous research has shown that placement of preweanling rats in an unfamiliar environment inhibits both heart rate and behavioral orienting responses to an auditory stimulus, and that the orienting response gradually reappears during the following 15 min. Four experiments designed to evaluate two potential explanations of this effect were conducted. If the arousal induced by an unfamiliar environment disrupts sensory information processing, so should the arousal induced by mild electric shock. In two experiments, the orienting response was inhibited in proportion to number of shocks received and rate of recovery was comparable to that observed in the unfamiliar environment. New environments also contain many unfamiliar stimuli which may overload the rats' limited information processing capacity. In two experiments a change in environmental stimulation was shown to inhibit the orienting response. Recovery of the orienting response followed the same time course as that seen following shock or placement in an unfamiliar environment. Although the results of this study clearly demonstrate environmental inhibition of the orienting response, they provide little support for either the "arousal" or the "information overload" hypotheses of orienting response inhibition. The implications of these data for current theoretical conceptualizations of the orienting response are discussed.